The Russians Are Coming, Again. John Marciano
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which were significant.49
The Times meanwhile refused to characterize the Maidan protests that resulted in the overthrow of Yanukovych as a coup when even Maidan protestors in Kiev characterized it as such since they could not pass a referendum for impeachment. The Times in turn sugarcoated the new regime led by Petro Poroshenko, who was described in a WikiLeaks cable from the American embassy as a “disgraced oligarch … tainted by credible corruption allegations,” and appointed as deputy prime minister a member of the far-right Svoboda Party who told the EU parliament that a “fascist dictatorship is the best way to rule a country.”50
The Times further failed to report on the CIA and George Soros Foundation’s role in financing the Maidan protests, and on the humanitarian crisis that resulted from brutal “anti-terrorist” operations directed by Kiev against pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Donbass region who were falsely labeled “pawns of Putin” (the region is, in fact, Russian-speaking and has strong interests in remaining tied to Russia). Warning about the plight of over a million displaced children whose schools had been destroyed, UNICEF referred to “an invisible emergency which most of the world has forgotten.” This was thanks largely to the blackout in the Times and other media that also ignored the machinations of the Biden wing of the Obama administration in undermining efforts by John Kerry to promote the Minsk peace agreements, possibly because of Biden’s son Hunter’s business interests in the Ukraine. Hunter was named to the board of a Ukrainian Natural Gas company in April 2014—just three months after the coup.51
Lessons Not Learned
The similarities between the blitz in 2002–2003 for war against Iraq and for action against Russia and Putin are striking. Many readers will recall how the CIA under George W. Bush leaked phony intelligence to Michael Gordon and Judith Miller of the Times, claiming that Iraq was procuring aluminum tubes to enrich uranium for its nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (WMD). James Carden, a former adviser to the U.S.-Russia Presidential Commission at the State Department, pointed out in 2017 that something eerily similar was taking place regarding Russia, in which “assurances from the intelligence community and from anonymous Obama administration ‘senior officials’ about the existence of evidence [regarding alleged election hacking] is being treated as … actual evidence.”52
As a sign of continuity, Michael Gordon, a chief culprit in “helping to scam the USA into occupation and invasion of Iraq,” is among those who have reported disinformation about Ukraine. Fellow Iraq War cheerleaders have been among the loudest to demonize Putin. Charles Krauthammer told Fox News: “Of course it all [DNC hacks] came from the Russians, I’m sure it’s all there in the intel.” David Frum in The Atlantic stated that Trump “owes his office in considerable part to illegal clandestine activities in his favor conducted by a hostile, foreign spy service.” Jacob Weisberg agrees, tweeting: “Russian covert action threw the election to Donald Trump. It’s that simple.” This is the same Weisberg who wrote back in 2008, “The first thing I hope I’ve learned from this experience of being wrong about Iraq is to be less trusting of expert opinion and received wisdom.”53 Lesson not learned.
Placing the Election Hysteria in Context
When U.S. intelligence agencies finally released a declassified version of its report on the election, the New York Times and the Washington Post quoted from it verbatim, supporting the conclusion that Putin and Russia were behind the DNC hacks. Close reading of the report, however, shows that it barely supports such a conclusion. Devoting considerable attention to the Russia Today (RT) news network, which was impugned for offering critical analysis of U.S. politics, the report merely provided an “assessment,” which journalist Robert Parry notes is an “admission” that the classified information was “less than conclusive because, in intelligence-world-speak” to “assess” actually means “to guess.”54
Historian Gareth Porter writes that the intelligence community never obtained evidence to prove Russia was behind WikiLeaks’ publication of the DNC emails, “much less that it had done so with the intention of electing Trump.” After the U.S. election, DNI James Clapper testified twice before Congress that “the intelligence community did not know who had provided the emails to WikiLeaks and when they were provided.” The NSA further considered the idea that the Kremlin was working to elect Trump as merely plausible, not actually supported by reliable evidence.55
Half of Clinton voters nevertheless believe that Russia not only leaked emails but tampered with vote tallies. A more plausible scenario is that either Clinton blamed Russia to try to save her campaign, or that CIA director John Brennan, appointed by President Obama, initiated the election-hacking scandal and Russia-Gate investigations in order to preserve a belligerent policy toward Russia to which the CIA and other national security organizations were committed. Brennan issued a public warning to Trump about his Russian policy on Fox News. “I think Mr. Trump has to understand that absolving Russia of various actions that it’s taken in the past number of years is a road that he, I think, needs to be very, very careful about moving down.”56
In December 2016, twenty intelligence, military, and diplomatic veterans who had formed Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) sent an open letter to President Obama calling on him to release the evidence that proves Russia aided the Trump campaign—or to admit that it does not exist. They wrote that the alleged Russian interference in the election has been called “an act of war” and Mr. Trump a “traitor”; the “intelligence,” however, to support these assertions, “does not pass the smell test.” Obama never responded.
The VIPS wrote that media attacks against Trump and Putin were lacking journalistic standards as top intelligence officials “published what we found to be an embarrassingly shoddy report purporting to prove Russian hacking in support of Trump’s candidacy,” and a Times banner headline said: “PUTIN LED SCHEME TO AID TRUMP, REPORT SAYS.” The paper claimed that the revelations in “this damning report … undermined the legitimacy” of the President-Elect, and “made the case that Mr. Trump was the favored candidate of Mr. Putin,” but a back-page article in the same issue stated: “What is missing from the 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.… [There was] no discussion of the forensics used to recognize the handiwork of known hacking groups, no mention of intercepted communications between the Kremlin and the hackers, no hint of spies reporting from inside Moscow’s propaganda machinery.”57
For VIPS, the key question was how the material from “Russian hacking” got to WikiLeaks, because WikiLeaks published the DNC and Podesta emails (John Podesta was chairman of Hillary Clinton’s election campaign). William Binney, former technical director of the NSA, pointed out it “would almost certainly have yielded a record of any electronic transfer from Russia to WikiLeaks.” If Obama could not make public any evidence, he probably did not have any.58
A forensics study undertaken by a retired IBM program manager, Skip Folden, found that DNC data were copied onto a storage device at a speed that exceeds the Internet capability for a remote hack. The operation was performed on the East Coast of the United States, suggesting an inside leak, which was later doctored to incriminate Russia. Folden’s study was ignored by the Times and other media, along with the curious fact that the FBI never sought access to the DNC computers as part of its investigation or bothered to interview a British diplomat who claims to have met the leaker outside Washington.59 Months after the fact, when the government’s own investigation stalled, the Times kept publishing sensational front-page exposés purporting to unearth secret hackers in Ukraine, and a diabolical plot by Russia to set up fake social media accounts to spread stories critical of Clinton and U.S. foreign policy, which the Times baselessly claimed helped sway the election.60
Russia-Gate in Context: Trump and His Pro-Kremlin Cabinet
Times writers have routinely lambasted Donald Trump for his alleged “slavish devotion to the Russian strongman” as Max Boot put it in an op-ed