A report published by The Washington Post on Monday revealed how the CIA has supported covert Ukrainian attacks inside Russia, including the killing of Darya Dugina, daughter of the prominent Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin.
The report said the killing of Dugina was carried out by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and that it was one of many operations inside Russian territory involving special units the CIA helped form in the wake of the 2014 coup in Kyiv that ousted former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
The report reads: “The missions have involved elite teams of Ukrainian operatives drawn from directorates that were formed, trained, and equipped in close partnership with the CIA, according to current and former Ukrainian and US officials. Since 2015, the CIA has spent tens of millions of dollars to transform Ukraine’s Soviet-formed services into potent allies against Moscow, officials said.”
The CIA support since 2015 has included advanced surveillance systems, training both inside Ukraine and inside the US, the building of new headquarters for Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, and intelligence sharing thought unimaginable pre-2014. Officials told the Post that the CIA still maintains a significant presence in Kyiv to this day.
The CIA helped the SBU form a new unit known as the “Fifth Directorate.” Recruits for the new unit were trained by the CIA outside of Kyiv with the purpose of forming groups “capable of operating behind front lines and working as covert groups.”
The CIA also gave major support to Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, known as the GUR. “We calculated that GUR was a smaller and more nimble organization where we could have more impact,” a former US intelligence official who worked in Ukraine told the Post. “GUR was our little baby. We gave them all new equipment and training.”
Officials insisted that the CIA was not involved in targeted killings carried out by Ukrainian intelligence and said the focus was on “bolstering those services’ abilities to gather intelligence on a dangerous adversary.” The report said the SBU and the GUR have been involved in dozens of assassinations against Russian officials in Russian-controlled Ukraine, alleged Ukrainian collaborators, and Russian officials and civilians deep inside Russia.
Darya Dugina was killed in a car bombing outside of Moscow in August 2022, but officials said her father was the real target. Despite the fact that they are civilians, Ukrainian officials justify Dugina’s killing because she was a supporter of Russia’s war in Ukraine, telling the Post she was no “innocent victim.” One security official called her the “daughter of the father of Russian propaganda.” The official said the car bombing and other operations inside Russia are “about narrative” and showing enemies of Ukraine that “punishment is imminent even for those who think they are untouchable.”
The report, which was based on conversations with more than two dozen current and former Ukrainian, US, and Western intelligence and security officials, said the CIA has objected to some of the Ukrainian operations but never withdrew support. Other assassinations inside Russia have included Stanislav Rzhitsky, a former Russian submarine commander who was killed while jogging in a park in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar, and Maksim Fomin, known as Vladlen Tatarsky, a military blogger killed in a bombing at a cafe in St. Petersburg.
The SBU was also behind the two attacks on the Kerch Bridge, which connects Russia to the Crimean Peninsula. The first attack in October 2022 was a truck bombing that killed five people. According to the Post, the driver of the truck, who was killed in the explosion, was unaware the SBUhadplanted a bomb in his vehicle. The second attack on the Kerch Bridge involved naval drones that, according to the Post, were “developed as part of a top-secret operation involving the CIA and other Western intelligence services.”
A former CIA official compared the CIA-backed Ukrainian intelligence services to Israel’s Mossad, which is known for being behind assassinations in Iran. “We are seeing the birth of a set of intelligence services that are like Mossad in the 1970s,” the official said, adding there are risks for NATO. “If Ukraine’s intelligence operations become even bolder — targeting Russians in third countries, for example — you could imagine how that might cause rifts with partners and come into serious tension with Ukraine’s broader strategic goals.”
To those who are totally ignorant of Russia, meaning all of the American political elites and most of the foreign policy expert community, Russia is easy to comprehend, an easy target for labels like “autocracy” and “imperialist.” But then these folks don’t care much about the peculiarities of friends and allies abroad, so long as they are totally subservient to Washington. Why should they bother themselves with the realities of a country that stretches across 11 time zones, accounts for nearly 15% of the Earth’s land mass and has 145 million people drawn from a multitude of ethnic groups or “nationalities”?
Sunday night’s edition of the Vladimir Solovyov talk show gave an unequivocal negative answer to both questions in my title thanks to some extraordinary statements by one panelist, deputy chairman of the State Duma Aleksandr Mikhailovich Babakov.
Leaders and representatives of the Duma parties outside the governing United Russia group have been a permanent fixture of the Solovyov show going back years. Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov used to be an invitee, but he was not a good conversationalist and has disappeared from view. Instead, the Communist parliamentarian and chair of the Duma committee on relations with the Community of Independent States [former Soviet Union republics] Leonid Kalashnikov is a regular panelist. He and Solovyov engage in sparring, the one standing for Communism in general and a full war economy today, the other for the free market. Their contests are as predictable as televised American wrestling used to be.
The founder and leader of the right wing Liberal Democrats (LDPR), Vladimir Zhirinovsky, was a frequent guest on the Solovyov show till his death in the midst of the Covid pandemic. Solovyov shared many of Zhirinovsky’s nationalist, anti-Western views and allowed him to verbally whiplash other panelists. I know this from the receiving end when I was denounced by Zhirinovsky as a spy during my one invitation to the show back in 2016. But then again, most any Western visitor was a spy in Zhirinovsky’s lexicon and it always would draw a laugh from the audience.
Zhirinovsky’s serious contributions to the panels were often in connection with his expert knowledge of Turkish affairs as a speaker of the language. He also roundly criticized the Putin government for its gently-gently approach to foreign relations. If Zhirinovsky had his way, the Russians would have bombed Berlin long ago. As for foreign aid, Zhirinovsky did not believe in the way it was practiced in the past by the Soviet Union with blank checks to the friends of Russia. Instead he called upon the government to use its diplomatic efforts to establish relations abroad that brought net revenues to Moscow, in emulation of the United States. As you will see below, I think this part of Zhirinovsky’s policy platform has influenced the Putin government. However, it would be better if Russia’s senior statesmen did not openly show their intentions.
Zhirinovsky’s successor as chair of the party bloc in the Duma, Leonid Slutsky, is dull as dull can be and never appears on the talk show. However, a fellow LDPR deputy, former KGB operative Andrei Lugovoy, who is wanted by UK police on suspicion of the murder of Litvinenko, is invited fairly frequently by Solovyov and adds some spice to the discussions of relations with the West. He is no friend of London and is pushing a much more aggressive line than the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Now I turn to the panelist last night who so impressed me: Babakov. Let us begin with what he said.
The main topic he pursued was a very harsh critique of the work of the head of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, who is one of the relatively few survivors of the Liberal group of economic advisers at the center of power for well more than a decade. She worked under Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin. She worked under minister, later Sberbank chief executive German Gref. Both were/are Putin protégés. And, most importantly, she clearly enjoys the protection of Vladimir Putin today. In that regard, Babakov’s criticism of her is ….a direct criticism of Putin himself. And since what Babakov was saying is also being said by many ordinary Russians, its airing on state television is politically important.
Babakov told us that Nabiullina is leading the economy into the desert by its current policy of very high interest rates to combat inflation, all of which results in falling investments and stagnating production that, in turn, will set off a new round of inflation as output does not keep pace with buying power and demand. Babakov has every right to challenge the country’s financial management: he holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Moscow State University and is a successful entrepreneur who made his fortune by companies he co-founded in Ukraine in the energy sector and diverse interests including a major hotel in Kiev.
Babakov explained at length last night why Russia should look more closely at the Chinese model of economic and financial management, wherein the equivalent of Russia’s Central Bank, the Bank of China, is not an independent actor but works in close coordination with the government to support its growth plans and sets out different interest rates and conditions for the different levels of business, from small enterprises to medium and very large enterprises. Moreover, Babakov praised the Chinese rules on currency management and especially the controls on currency transfers abroad. Whereas in Russia anyone with the funds in his account can transfer up to one million dollars abroad each month, in China the limit is a thousand times less.
These remarks by Babakov are in direct contradiction with Nabiullina’s public rejection of the Chinese model as unsuitable to Russia last week at a meeting on finance at which other heavy hitters in the field, including the chairman of VTB bank (the former Foreign Trade Bank) Andrei Kostin also spoke. Kostin, by the way, had been advocating for a Chinese like bifurcation of the foreign exchange market between domestic and foreign transaction exchange rates.
Babakov also had his spear out for Finance Minister Siluanov. He repeated Siluanov’s stupid sounding advice to the two hundred parliamentarians from most Latin American countries who gathered in Moscow last week as guests of the Russian State Duma. Per Babakov, who as Duma deputy chair took part in all the proceedings, the visitors included many speakers of their national parliaments and all had made the trip to Moscow in defiance of heavy lobbying by the U.S. embassy in their country to keep them away from Russia’s embrace. What impressed him most was that the Latin Americans all expressed their support for Russia, their correct understanding of the causes of the war in Ukraine and their rejection of any sanctions against Moscow. They enthusiastically embraced Putin’s speech to them.
Of course, implied Babakov, during their stay the visitors hoped to hear about Russian investment plans in their region. Instead, Siluanov told them that money is not the essential thing in life, that what you need is to be smart and to have good hands so that you can get along on less money. To Babakov’s thinking, Siluanov was singing from the wrong scores in the wrong opera.
Will the attacks on the government’s bank chief and finance minister by Babakov and others like him bring them down? Quite possibly. The ruble’s slipping below 100 to the dollar yesterday has unnerved middle class Russians. If they listened to Kostin’s projection that in the coming year the ruble’s value in dollar terms may fall further by half, then they will be an unstoppable force against Nabiullina and the other free market defenders in Putin’s circle.
I have watched Babakov on the Solovyov show many times and he always was dapperly dressed. His demeanor is avuncular. You understand at once that he is not in anyone’s pocket. He has changed his party affiliations several times over the years. For a time he headed the very patriotic Rodina (Homeland) party that was founded by the maverick politician Dmitry Rogozin. Then he spent several years in the left-of-center A Just Russia party headed by Sergei Mironov. He quit that and took a position in a public activism organization under the aegis of the governing United Russia party. Next he was a founder of the Za pravdu (For truth) party which eventually formed an alliance with Mironov in a hyphenated joint organization.
From 2003 to 2016 Babakov was an elected member of the Duma. From 2016 to 2020, he served in the upper chamber of the Russian legislature with the title of Senator. But that was an appointive position. Next he took what is nominally a step down to run again for a seat in the State Duma, won and rose to deputy speaker there. Meanwhile, he has served on a number of Presidential missions, including responsibility for relations with organizations of compatriots abroad and on a council overseeing implementation of the country’s National Projects.
Clearly Babakov is an insider in the Russian power elite while always having freedom of movement, and as Sunday night indicated, freedom of expression. Notwithstanding his financial declarations before standing for election to the Duma showing that he owns almost nothing and has annual revenues of perhaps $20,000 per year, his Wikipedia entry tells us that he owns an estate in France said to be worth $16 million and an apartment on the Rue de l’Université in Paris. Since he is on the EU sanctions list, it is doubtful he gets much pleasure from these properties today.
To understand the complexity of Russia’s power structure, it pays to take a look at the pre-political biography of Babakov. He was born in 1963 and grew up in the capital, Kishinev (today’s Chișinău), of what is today the poorest state in Europe, Moldova (then the Moldavian SSR). So how did this boy from the far provinces get into Moscow State University and then make his way to the top of Russian-Ukrainian business and political elites?
First, it happened because Soviet society and now Russian society was and is very mobile, with many social ladders for kids with brains and talent. To those who doubt this because it does not jibe with the concept of a corrupt, autocratic regime, I say: rethink the latter, not the former.
Secondly, it happened because at the time when young Babakov was ready to enroll in a university Moldova was doing very well. It was home base of party leader Leonid Brezhnev and received priority investment into its agrarian economy and also into industry. It was closely linked to Moscow by many daily flights, more, for example than to Soviet Georgia. I know: I was there at the time. In 1978 I visited the orchards and vegetable farms of Moldova in the company of Castle & Cooke Inc. top management for furtherance of their plans to grow iceberg lettuce in the USSR. I wrote about this in my Memoirs of a Russianist, Volume I.
The agricultural machinery company FMC had very extensive farm projects in Moldova at the time to grow tomatoes and process them for puree. In another domain, the American pharmaceutical company Abbott Labs built the first infant formula factory (Similac) in the Soviet Union in Moldova in the mid-1970s. I saw that the shops in Kishinev were better stocked than those in Moscow. It was this Moldova that was the launching pad for Mr. Babakov.
Surely it was this personal experience of how a distant and formerly poor land can become prosperous under state planning and then revert to dire poverty under free market management and adverse geopolitical developments that shapes Mr. Babakov’s beliefs on the benefits of state dirigisme today. There are many others with similar experience and critical views of the now inappropriate Liberal economic policies being pursued under Vladimir Putin. They will probably win out.
In April, The American Committee for US-Russia Accord (ACURA) released a statement condemning the arrest and detainment of the American journalist Evan Gershkovich by Russian authorities on espionage charges.
Sadly, 6 months later, we are compelled to protest yet another arrest and detainment of an American journalist, Alsu Kurmasheva, an editor for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Upon her arrest, RFE/RL president Jeffrey Gedmin released a statement saying Ms. Kurmasheva, “Needs to be released so she can return to her family immediately.”
We agree.
The arrests of Mr. Gershkovich and Ms. Kurmasheva are an affront to the values of free inquiry and will only increase the already dangerous level of tension between the United States and Russia.
We call for their unconditional release.
We further call for all parties to the war in Ukraine to engage in meaningful dialogue to put an end to this conflict which has cost the lives of so many.
—The Board of the American Committee for US-Russia Accord
We are entering the end stage of the 30-year U.S. neoconservative debacle in Ukraine. The neocon plan to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by NATO has failed. Decisions now by the U.S. and Russia will matter enormously for peace, security, and wellbeing for the entire world.
Four events have shattered the neocon hopes for NATO enlargement eastward, to Ukraine, Georgia, and onward. The first is straightforward. Ukraine has been devastated on the battlefield, with tragic and appalling losses. Russia is winning the war of attrition, an outcome that was predictable from the start but which the neocons and mainstream media continue to deny.
The second is the collapsing support in Europe for the U.S. neocon strategy. Poland no longer speaks with Ukraine. Hungary has long opposed the neocons. Slovakia has elected an anti-neocon government. E.U. leaders—including Macron, Meloni, Sanchez, Scholz, Sunak, and others—have disapproval ratings far higher than approvals.
The third is the cut in U.S. financial support for Ukraine. The grassroots of the Republican Party, several GOP Presidential candidates, and a growing number of Republican members of Congress, oppose more spending on Ukraine. In the stop-gap bill to keep the government running, Republicans stripped away new financial support for Ukraine. The White House has called for new aid legislation, but this will be an uphill fight.
The fourth, and most urgent from Ukraine’s point of view, is the likelihood of a Russian offensive. Ukraine’s casualties are in the hundreds of thousands, and Ukraine has burned through its artillery, air defenses, tanks, and others heavy weapons. Russia is likely to follow with a massive offensive.
Biden foolishly refused to negotiate with Putin in December 2021. It’s time to negotiate now.
The neocons have created utter disasters in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and now Ukraine. The U.S. political system has not yet held the neocons to account, since foreign policy is carried out with little public or congressional scrutiny to date. Mainstream media have sided with the slogans of the neocons.
Ukraine is at risk of economic, demographic, and military collapse. What should the U.S. government do to face this potential disaster?
Urgently, it should change course. Britain advises the U.S. to escalate, as Britain is stuck with 19th-century imperial reveries. U.S. neocons are stuck with imperial bravado. Cooler heads urgently need to prevail.
President Joe Biden should immediately inform President Vladimir Putin that the U.S. will end NATO enlargement eastward if the U.S. and Russia reach a new agreement on security arrangements. By ending NATO expansion, the U.S. can still save Ukraine from the policy debacles of the past 30 years.
Biden should agree to negotiate a security arrangement of the kind, though not precise details, of Putin’s proposals of December 17, 2021. Biden foolishly refused to negotiate with Putin in December 2021. It’s time to negotiate now.
There are four keys to an agreement. First, as part of an overall agreement, Biden should agree that NATO will not enlarge eastward, but not reverse the past NATO enlargement. NATO would of course not tolerate Russian encroachments in existing NATO states. Both Russia and the U.S. would pledge to avoid provocations near Russia’s borders, including provocative missile placement, military exercises, and the like.
Second, the new U.S.-Russia security agreement should cover nuclear weapons. The U.S. unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, followed by the placement of Aegis missiles in Poland and Romania, gravely inflamed tensions, which were further exacerbated by the U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Agreement in 2019 and Russia’s suspension of the New Start Treaty in 2023. Russian leaders have repeatedly pointed to U.S. missiles near Russia, unconstrained by the abandoned ABM Treaty, as a dire threat to Russia’s national security.
Third, Russia and Ukraine would agree on new borders, in which the overwhelmingly ethnic Russian Crimea and heavily ethnic Russian districts of eastern Ukraine would remain part of Russia. The border changes would be accompanied by security guarantees for Ukraine backed unanimously by the UN Security Council and other states such as Germany, Turkey, and India.
Fourth, as part of a settlement, the U.S., Russia, and the E.U. would re-establish trade, finance, cultural exchange, and tourist relations. It’s certainly time once again to hear Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky in U.S. and European concert halls.
Border changes are a last resort, and should be made under the auspices of the UN Security Council. They must never be an invitation to further territorial demands, such as by Russia regarding ethnic Russians in other countries. Yet borders change, and the U.S. has recently backed two border changes. NATO bombed Serbia for 47 days until it relinquished the Albanian-majority region of Kosovo. In 2008, the U.S. recognized Kosovo as a sovereign nation. The U.S. government similarly backed South Sudan’s insurgency to break away from Sudan.
If Russia, Ukraine, or the U.S. subsequently violated the new agreement, they would be challenging the rest of the world. As President John F. Kennedy Jr. once observed, “even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in their own interest.”
The U.S. neocons carry much blame for undermining Ukraine’s 1991 borders. Russia did not claim Crimea until after the U.S.-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Nor did Russia annex the Donbas after 2014, instead calling on Ukraine to honor the UN-backed Minsk II agreement, based on autonomy for the Donbas. The neocons preferred to arm Ukraine to retake the Donbas by force rather than grant the Donbas autonomy.
The long-term key to peace in Europe is collective security as called for by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). According to OSCE agreements, OSCE member states “will not strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other States.” Neocon unilateralism undermined Europe’s collective security by pushing NATO enlargement without regard to third parties, notably Russia. Europe—including the E.U., Russia, and Ukraine—needs more OSCE and less neocon unilateralism as key to lasting peace in Europe.
Consortium News sued the United States government and NewsGuard Technologies for allegedly defaming the independent media organization and violating the organization’s First Amendment rights.
A complaint [PDF] filed in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York claims that the Pentagon’s U.S. Cyber Command and NewsGuard are “carrying out a governmental program” under a contract known as “Misinformation Fingerprints” that involves the public labeling, targeting, and stigmatizing of news organizations that “differ or dissent from U.S. policy in connection with Russia or Ukraine.”
Media organizations that differ with U.S. official policy are labeled not “trustworthy,” purveyors of “false content,” or treated as “Russian propagandists” that are “anti-U.S.”
To remedy the alleged defamation and attack on freedom of the press, Consortium News seeks $13.6 million in “punitive” damages—twice the capital raised by NewsGuard in its push for investors.
Consortium News also requests an injunction to bar NewsGuard from continuing their practice of censorship that involves affixing false “nutrition labels” to their published articles.
“The First Amendment rights of all American media are threatened by this arrangement with the Defense Department that defames and threatens to abridge the speech of U.S. media groups,” declared Bruce Afran, an attorney representing Consortium News.
Afran added, “When media groups such as Consortium News are condemned by the government as ‘anti-U.S.’ and are accused of publishing ‘false content’ because they disagree with U.S. policies, the result is self-censorship and destruction of the public debate intended by the First Amendment.”
According to the complaint, the Defense Department granted NewsGuard a nearly $750,000 contract for tracking “misinformation” in September 2021.
“Our work for the Pentagon’s Cyber Command is focused on the identification and analysis of information operations targeting the US and its allies conducted by hostile governments, including Russia and China,” NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz acknowledged in March 2023. “Our analysts alert officials in the U.S. and in other democracies, including Ukraine, about new false narratives targeting America and its allies, and we provide an understanding of how this disinformation spreads online.”
NewsGuard’s board of directors as well as its advisory board include former Homeland Security director Tom Ridge, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden, and former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
While Crovitz and the startup’s other CEO Steven Brill are veterans of the news media, Consortium News contends that NewsGuard is far from a “journalistic endeavor.” Its “reviewers” contact organizations they intend to “target” and act as if they are “reporters.” However, at any given time, they are effectively collecting intelligence that will be shared with Cybercom involving media organizations that supposedly spread Russian “misinformation.”
If NewsGuard takes issue with a handful of articles from a media organization, then every article published by that entity will have a “warning label.” It does not matter if the vast majority of this content has not been disputed by the company.
The company has only disputed six articles out of more than 20,000 articles, according to Consortium News. When subscribers use NewsGuard’s browser tool, all articles on the site carry warnings.
More specifically, Consortium News asserts that NewsGuard’s defamation began on August 11, 2022, when they attached the following “red flag” (now a blue flag) and warning described the organization as a “website that covers international politics from a left-wing, anti-U.S. perspective that has published false claims about the Ukraine-Russia war and other international conflicts.”
NewsGuard’s reviews involve attaching “nutrition labels” that tell subscribers of their service that Consortium News “repeatedly” publishes “false content,” refuses to “correct or clarify errors,” and declines to “gather and present information responsibly.”
Exhibit filed along with the amended complaint filed in the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York
Additionally, the label is affixed to content that Consortium News republishes to their website. That means that an article published by Common Dreams on the war in Ukraine can have a 100% rating on Common Dreams but a 47.5% rating when the “identical text” is posted to Consortium News.
Before the “nutrition labels” first appeared on Consortium News’ articles, NewsGuard employee Zachary Fishman contacted the media organization to conduct a “review” of the site’s “publication of false content.” For example, Fishman singled out a February 2022 article headlined, “Ukraine: Guides to Reflection” and called attention to this portion of the article.
Hence, the inflation of Russian behavior in Ukraine (where Washington organized a coup against a democratically elected government because we disliked its political complexion) and Syria (where Russia’s intervention is at the request of the established government while the U.S. commitment to occupying parts of it has no legal basis).
NewsGuard took issue with holding the U.S. government responsible for the role that U.S. officials played in the coup in Ukraine in 2014.
Consortium News editor-in-chief Joe Lauria showed NewsGuard that many of the details questioned by NewsGuard could be found in reports published by BBC, The Guardian, Christian Science Monitor, and The Progressive. But those sites do not have labels that cast doubt on the veracity of their journalism.
Such false claims about Consortium News, as the complaint asserts, violate the media organization’s First Amendment rights because NewsGuard is working jointly with Cybercom and receives payment to “punish or discourage speech that is contrary to U.S. policy positions.”
NewsGuard has an initiative with public libraries and libraries of public universities. On the company’s website, they highlight a “case study” from Cienega High School in Vail, Arizona, which is a public school.
“With NewsGuard, the information is there for the students,” said Chris Salvagio, a Cienega High School teacher [PDF]. “Kids don’t really know the meaning of credibility and transparency, so having NewsGuard’s criteria for each listed in a way that’s accessible and easy to use helps, too, by helping us come up with a clear definition of what a reliable source is. NewsGuard really helped me buttress the things I’ve already taught before.”
In January 2019, the New York Times published a profile of the company that described its plans to fight “fake news.” Crovitz seemed to pose the type of government involvement in news labeling that Cybercom has encouraged his company to perform.
“We’d be very uncomfortable if the government were mandating anything with regard to news,” Crovitz declared, when asked if they wanted to see an equivalent to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) labeling for media. “That would violate free speech values. You have the First Amendment.”
In May 2022, PayPal banned Consortium News from using their service but provided little to no explanation for their decision. It is unclear to what extent NewsGuard’s labeling may have influenced PayPal’s censorious action.
Finally, NewsGuard has also abused its influence over journalism and fact-checking online by labeling WikiLeaks with a red warning.
“This website fails to meet several basic standards of credibility and transparency,” NewsGuard deceitfully stated. A “nutrition label” described WikiLeaks as a “publisher of confidential documents, often acquired from leakers and hackers. WikiLeaks published hacked emails, traced to the Kremlin, that hurt Democrats ahead of the 2016 presidential election.”
NewsGuard acknowledged that WikiLeaks did not “repeatedly publish false content” and, in fact, revealed who is in charge, including “any possible conflicts of interest.” It did not publish “deceptive headlines.”
Yet the tracking tool maintained the site failed to gather and present information responsibly and did not handle the “difference between news and opinion responsibly,” which are common responses from the US national security state to undermine the credibility of independent media organizations that challenge dominant narratives.
While the U.S. Justice Department prosecutes WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (a case that Consortium News has extensively covered), NewsGuard seeks to scare students, academics, and the general public into avoiding the transparency website as a resource, even though news media like the Washington Post and New York Times have frequently cited documents from WikiLeaks in their coverage of U.S. foreign policy.
Full press conference with Bruce Afran and Joe Lauria on the new lawsuit:
