By Jacob Siegel, Tablet Magazine, 3/28/23

PROLOGUE: THE INFORMATION WAR

In 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed that he had proof of a communist spy ring operating inside the government. Overnight, the explosive accusations blew up in the national press, but the details kept changing. Initially, McCarthy said he had a list with the names of 205 communists in the State Department; the next day he revised it to 57. Since he kept the list a secret, the inconsistencies were beside the point. The point was the power of the accusation, which made McCarthy’s name synonymous with the politics of the era.

For more than half a century, McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals: a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts, and demagogues.

Until 2017, that is, when another list of alleged Russian agents roiled the American press and political class. A new outfit called Hamilton 68 claimed to have discovered hundreds of Russian-affiliated accounts that had infiltrated Twitter to sow chaos and help Donald Trump win the election. Russia stood accused of hacking social media platforms, the new centers of power, and using them to covertly direct events inside the United States.

None of it was true. After reviewing Hamilton 68’s secret list, Twitter’s safety officer, Yoel Roth, privately admitted that his company was allowing “real people” to be “unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse.”

The Hamilton 68 episode played out as a nearly shot-for-shot remake of the McCarthy affair, with one important difference: McCarthy faced some resistance from leading journalists as well as from the U.S. intelligence agencies and his fellow members of Congress. In our time, those same groups lined up to support the new secret lists and attack anyone who questioned them.

When proof emerged earlier this year that Hamilton 68 was a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people, it was met with a great wall of silence in the national press. The disinterest was so profound, it suggested a matter of principle rather than convenience for the standard-bearers of American liberalism who had lost faith in the promise of freedom and embraced a new ideal.

In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war.

Something in the looming specter of Donald Trump and the populist movements of 2016 reawakened sleeping monsters in the West. Disinformation, a half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat. Russia was said to have exploited the vulnerabilities of the open internet to bypass U.S. strategic defenses by infiltrating private citizens’ phones and laptops. The Kremlin’s endgame was to colonize the minds of its targets, a tactic cyber warfare specialists call “cognitive hacking.”

Defeating this specter was treated as a matter of national survival. “The U.S. Is Losing at Influence Warfare,” warned a December 2016 article in the defense industry journal, Defense One. The article quoted two government insiders arguing that laws written to protect U.S. citizens from state spying were jeopardizing national security. According to Rand Waltzman, a former program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, America’s adversaries enjoyed a “significant advantage” as the result of “legal and organizational constraints that we are subject to and they are not.”

The point was echoed by Michael Lumpkin, who headed the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), the agency Obama designated to run the U.S. counter-disinformation campaign. Lumpkin singled out the Privacy Act of 1974, a post-Watergate law protecting U.S. citizens from having their data collected by the government, as antiquated. “The 1974 act was created to make sure that we aren’t collecting data on U.S. citizens. Well, … by definition the World Wide Web is worldwide. There is no passport that goes with it. If it’s a Tunisian citizen in the United States or a U.S. citizen in Tunisia, I don’t have the ability to discern that … If I had more ability to work with that [personally identifiable information] and had access … I could do more targeting, more definitively, to make sure I could hit the right message to the right audience at the right time.”

The message from the U.S. defense establishment was clear: To win the information war—an existential conflict taking place in the borderless dimensions of cyberspace—the government needed to dispense with outdated legal distinctions between foreign terrorists and American citizens.

Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a “whole of society” effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.

Step one in the national mobilization to defeat disinfo fused the U.S. national security infrastructure with the social media platforms, where the war was being fought. The government’s lead counter-disinformation agency, the GEC, declared that its mission entailed “seeking out and engaging the best talent within the technology sector.” To that end, the government started deputizing tech executives as de facto wartime information commissars.

At companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Amazon, the upper management levels had always included veterans of the national security establishment. But with the new alliance between U.S. national security and social media, the former spooks and intelligence agency officials grew into a dominant bloc inside those companies; what had been a career ladder by which people stepped up from their government experience to reach private tech-sector jobs turned into an ouroboros that molded the two together. With the D.C.-Silicon Valley fusion, the federal bureaucracies could rely on informal social connections to push their agenda inside the tech companies.

In the fall of 2017, the FBI opened its Foreign Influence Task Force for the express purpose of monitoring social media to flag accounts trying to “discredit U.S. individuals and institutions.” The Department of Homeland Security took on a similar role.

At around the same time, Hamilton 68 blew up. Publicly, Twitter’s algorithms turned the Russian-influence-exposing “dashboard” into a major news story. Behind the scenes, Twitter executives quickly figured out that it was a scam. When Twitter reverse-engineered the secret list, it found, according to the journalist Matt Taibbi, that “instead of tracking how Russia influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming.” The discovery prompted Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, to suggest in an October 2017 email that the company take action to expose the hoax and “call this out on the bullshit it is.”

In the end, neither Roth nor anyone else said a word. Instead, they let a purveyor of industrial-grade bullshit—the old-fashioned term for disinformation—continue dumping its contents directly into the news stream.

It was not enough for a few powerful agencies to combat disinformation. The strategy of national mobilization called for “not only the whole-of-government, but also whole-of-society” approach, according to a document released by the GEC in 2018. “To counter propaganda and disinformation,” the agency stated, “will require leveraging expertise from across government, tech and marketing sectors, academia, and NGOs.”

This is how the government-created “war against disinformation” became the great moral crusade of its time. CIA officers at Langley came to share a cause with hip young journalists in Brooklyn, progressive nonprofits in D.C., George Soros-funded think tanks in Prague, racial equity consultants, private equity consultants, tech company staffers in Silicon Valley, Ivy League researchers, and failed British royals. Never Trump Republicans joined forces with the Democratic National Committee, which declared online disinformation “a whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response.”

Even trenchant critics of the phenomenon—including Taibbi and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Jeff Gerth, who recently published a dissection of the press’s role in promoting false Trump-Russia collusion claims—have focused on the media’s failures, a framing largely shared by conservative publications, which treat disinformation as an issue of partisan censorship bias. But while there’s no question that the media has utterly disgraced itself, it’s also a convenient fall guy—by far the weakest player in the counter-disinformation complex. The American press, once the guardian of democracy, was hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives.

It would be nice to call what has taken place a tragedy, but an audience is meant to learn something from a tragedy. As a nation, America not only has learned nothing, it has been deliberately prevented from learning anything while being made to chase after shadows. This is not because Americans are stupid; it’s because what has taken place is not a tragedy but something closer to a crime. Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up; a weapon that doubles as a disguise.

The crime is the information war itself, which was launched under false pretenses and by its nature destroys the essential boundaries between the public and private and between the foreign and domestic, on which peace and democracy depend. By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against Americans citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations. The crime is the routine violation of Americans’ rights by unelected officials who secretly control what individuals can think and say.

What we are seeing now, in the revelations exposing the inner workings of the state-corporate censorship regime, is only the end of the beginning. The United States is still in the earliest stages of a mass mobilization that aims to harness every sector of society under a singular technocratic rule. The mobilization, which began as a response to the supposedly urgent menace of Russian interference, now evolves into a regime of total information control that has arrogated to itself the mission of eradicating abstract dangers such as error, injustice, and harm—a goal worthy only of leaders who believe themselves to be infallible, or comic-book supervillains.

The first phase of the information war was marked by distinctively human displays of incompetence and brute-force intimidation. But the next stage, already underway, is being carried out through both scalable processes of artificial intelligence and algorithmic pre-censorship that are invisibly encoded into the infrastructure of the internet, where they can alter the perceptions of billions of people.

Something monstrous is taking shape in America. Formally, it exhibits the synergy of state and corporate power in service of a tribal zeal that is the hallmark of fascism. Yet anyone who spends time in America and is not a brainwashed zealot can tell that it is not a fascist country. What is coming into being is a new form of government and social organization that is as different from mid-twentieth century liberal democracy as the early American republic was from the British monarchism that it grew out of and eventually supplanted. A state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals, is being replaced by a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms. It resembles the Chinese system of social credit and one-party state control, and yet that, too, misses the distinctively American and providential character of the control system. In the time we lose trying to name it, the thing itself may disappear back into the bureaucratic shadows, covering up any trace of it with automated deletions from the top-secret data centers of Amazon Web Services, “the trusted cloud for government.”

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

In a technical or structural sense, the censorship regime’s aim is not to censor or to oppress, but to rule. That’s why the authorities can never be labeled as guilty of disinformation. Not when they lied about Hunter Biden’s laptops, not when they claimed that the lab leak was a racist conspiracy, not when they said that vaccines stopped transmission of the novel coronavirus. Disinformation, now and for all time, is whatever they say it is. That is not a sign that the concept is being misused or corrupted; it is the precise functioning of a totalitarian system.

If the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim, it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind. What follows is an attempt to see how this philosophy has manifested in reality. It approaches the subject of disinformation from 13 angles—like the “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens’ 1917 poem—with the aim that the composite of these partial views will provide a useful impression of disinformation’s true shape and ultimate design.

Read the full report here.

Link here.

Earlier this month, two infamous Russian pranksters tricked former French president Francois Hollande into an interview under the pretense that he was speaking to former Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko. The whole 15 minute interview is worth watching, but at around the 7-1/2 minute mark Hollande begins discussing the Minsk agreements. He confirms that they were a ruse to buy time for Ukraine to build up its military and he also proceeds to admit that the west overthrew the Yanukovich government in 2014 with Poroshenko’s assistance.

Link here.

By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, 4/17/23

A Washington Post headline last week was a bombshell for someone who has only been reading about the Ukraine war in The Washington Post and other Western media: “U.S. doubts Ukraine counteroffensive will yield big gains, leaked document says.”

The story admits that Western media audiences have been misled about the course of the war, that essentially what mainstream media has been reporting about Ukraine has been a pack of lies: namely that Ukraine is winning the war and is poised to launch an offensive that will lead to a final victory. 

Instead, the second paragraph of the piece makes clear the leaked documents show the long-planned Ukrainian offensive will fail miserably — “a marked departure from the Biden administration’s public statements about the vitality of Ukraine’s military.”  

In other words, U.S. officials have been lying about the state of the war to the public and to reporters who have faithfully reported their every word without a hint of skepticism.

The Post said, as if it’s a bad thing, that the leaks will likely “embolden critics who feel the United States and NATO should do more to push for a negotiated settlement to the conflict.”

That has begun to happen. Writing in the uber-Establishment Foreign Affairs, former State Department official Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, write that “it is difficult to feel sanguine about where the war is headed.”

In “The West Needs a New Strategy in Ukraine: A Plan for Getting From the Battlefield to the Negotiating Table,” they say:

“The best path forward is a sequenced two-pronged strategy aimed at first bolstering Ukraine’s military capability and then, when the fighting season winds down late this year, ushering Moscow and Kyiv from the battlefield to the negotiating table.”  

The article does not mention the leaks, though it was published after the disclosures made clear that the Ukrainian offensive, intended to  break through Russia’s land bridge to Crimea, would fail.

Filled with the usual talk about Ukraine having better “operational skill” than Russia, and that the war will end in a “stalemate,” the piece represents an emerging strategy in the West: namely that before negotiating, Ukraine needs to launch its offensive to gain back some territory, “imposing heavy losses on Russia, foreclosing Moscow’s military options, and increasing its willingness to contemplate a diplomatic settlement.”

But that is a tall order. Moscow would be unlikely to negotiate at the end of the Ukrainian offensive, particularly as the article admits the “Russian military’s numerical superiority” and that Ukraine is “facing growing constraints on both its own manpower and help from abroad.” 

Moscow was ready to cut a deal with Kiev one month after Russia’s intervention but the West, with its strategy of lengthening the war to weaken Russia, quashed it. Why would Moscow accept a deal now when Ukraine is at its weakest and Russia is poised to make significant gains on the battlefield?

The Foreign Affairs piece admits, “This diplomatic gambit may well fail. Even if Russia and Ukraine continue to take significant losses, one or both of them may prefer to keep fighting.”

“Come the end of this fighting season,” the article says, “the United States and Europe will also have good reason to abandon their stated policy of supporting Ukraine for ‘as long as it takes,’ as U.S. President Joe Biden has put it.”

And what comes next? “NATO allies would start a strategic dialogue with Russia on arms control and the broader European security architecture.”  

Incredibly this is what Russia was asking for before its February 2022 intervention and it was rebuffed by NATO and the U.S.  Now a Foreign Affairs article is recommending it.

Is there no better sign that Ukraine has lost this war?

Going Ahead With the Offensive Anyway

The strategy of Ukraine going ahead with an offensive it knows will achieve little is Kiev’s last gasp — unless delusional neocons continue to outmaneuver the realists in Washington.

Most importantly for the West, the failure of this last-gasp attempt would serve as a way for it to escape the disaster it has created for itself: namely, the backfiring of the economic war on Russia; the failure of the information war in the non-West and ultimately defeat on the battlefield in its proxy war.   

Already in February, French President Emmanuel Macron, who is also pushing this strategy, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy that the game was up.  This news was brought to us by the establishment Wall Street Journal. 

And then ten days later U.S. intelligence provided a story to The New York Times that a pro-Ukraine “group,” and possibly the Ukrainian government itself, was behind the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, a way of distancing the U.S. from Kiev as the exit ramp looms into sight. 

Why Did the MSM Publish the Leaks?

Why did the Times, the Post and other establishment outlets publish stories about these leaks if they severely undermined their own credibility? There are three possibilities.   

The first is simply competition.  The Times or the Post may have gotten word that their rival had their hands on the leaks and did not want to be beat. There is almost nothing worse for an editor or reporter (in the petty world of journalism) then having to “match” a competitors’ story.

The second reason has to do with keeping up appearances. These leaks were eventually to come out somewhere and may not have been easily ignored. What would it have looked like if the big papers didn’t have it first?

More importantly, corporate journalism needs to keep up the pretense that it is actually doing journalism, i.e. that it will publish material from time to time that makes their governments look bad, and in this case, even themselves. They have to convince the public that they haven’t entirely given up on adversarial journalism if they are to survive.  

It was the same when corporate outlets partnered with WikiLeaks in 2010 to publish leaks that exposed U.S. war crimes. But eventually the media turned on Assange and WikiLeaks, and fell into line with the state. 

Why the Media Went After the Leaker

And that it is indeed what has happened here. After splashy stories about the leaks, the Times and the Post, teaming with Western intelligence-backed Bellingcat, turned their attention to finding the leaker, in what Elizabeth Vos in an article today on Consortium News argues makes corporate media the anti-WikiLeaks.

Rather than protecting the source of leaks, vital to the public, they hunted down the alleged leaker, 21-year old Air National Guardsman Jack Texiera, who was arrested by military-clad F.B.I. agents outside his Massachusetts home. 

So what is the third reason why the major media published the leaks?

Very likely for the same reason they published the stories about Macron and Scholz telling Zelensky he’s lost the war, and that the Ukrainian government may have been responsible for the Nord Stream sabotage:  to lay the ground work for the U.S. and its allies to pull the plug on their Ukrainian adventure by finally admitting Ukraine is losing.

Towards that end, there is speculation that Texiera did not act alone with the motive of impressing his teenage followers on the Discord chat forum, as the press has reported. 

Former C.I.A. analyst Larry Johnson believes Texiera was set up, possibly by a senior officer.  Johnson thinks this because among the documents Texiera allegedly leaked was one from the Central Intelligence Agency Operations Center, where Johnson used to work.

“CIA Operations Center produces two daily reports — one in the morning and one in the afternoon. It is not a ‘Community’ product, i.e., it is not distributed to the other intelligence agencies. It is an internal CIA document (of course, it is available to the Director of National Intelligence), ” Johnson wrote on his website Son of the New American Revolution.

Texiera was not in the C.I.A. so there is no way he’d have access to an Operations Center document, Johnson wrote. So how did he get his hands on it?

The implication is that Texiera may have been a patsy for someone within the realist wing of the U.S. military or intelligence establishment who opposes the neocons’ obsession with continuing the war at all costs.  

The neocons are not going down without a fight. John Bolton, the former U.S. national security advisor and chief neocon, wrote a desperate piece in The Wall Street Journal last week, titled, “A New American Grand Strategy to Counter Russia and China.”  

Bolton gets it that the world is changing, and not in America’s favor. So his response is not to reverse failed U.S. policy, for the U.S. to become part of the rest of the world rather than trying to dominate it, but to double down like a riverboat gambler.  His solution: raise military spending to Reagan-era levels; resume underground nuclear bomb testing and taking “the North Atlantic Treaty Organization global, inviting Japan, Australia, Israel and others committed to NATO defense-spending targets to join.”

Bolton laughingly says the U.S. must “exclude” Moscow and Beijing from the Middle East, where both capitals are orchestrating the most dramatic diplomatic transformation in decades.

But Boltons saves his best laugh for Ukraine:

“After Ukraine wins its war with Russia, we must aim to split the Russia-China axis. Moscow’s defeat could unseat Mr. Putin’s regime. What comes next is a government of unknowable composition. New Russian leaders may or may not look to the West rather than Beijing, and might be so weak that the Russian Federation’s fragmentation, especially east of the Urals, isn’t inconceivable.”

Even if the ludicrous Bolton is dismissed, there’s still a major obstacle in the realists’ way: Biden’s re-election campaign. He says he’s going to announce soon. He’s already thrown his lot in with the neocons.

Is there any conceivable way that he could accept Ukraine losing this war, after all the blue and yellow flag-waving, without also losing the election? 

The Biden team’s aim was to bleed Russia. But it is Ukraine that is hemorrhaging. Will reality at last overcome delusion in Washington?

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times.  He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe   

By Paul Robinson, Canadian Dimension ,4/5/23

A few years back, at the University of Ottawa’s summer convocation, I was startled to see a student come forward to collect his degree whose first name was Brezhnev. One suspects that his parents were African communists who named him after Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev as a mark of gratitude for the Soviets Union’s assistance in their country’s national liberation struggle against Western colonialism. It’s a striking example of how other people don’t see the world quite as we do.

In the eyes of most Westerners, their countries are bastions of liberalism, democracy and human rights. The Soviet Union, by contrast, was, as Reagan said, an “evil empire.” In the eyes of many others, however, Western countries are colonial oppressors who conquered and enslaved their ancestors. The Soviet Union—and by extension modern Russia—was free of guilt in this regard. It was even an ally in the fight against imperialism.

Consequently, the intense dislike of Russia that has gripped much of the West in recent years is largely absent elsewhere. This provides Russia with an opportunity that it is proving adept at exploiting.

As I mentioned in a previous article for Canadian Dimension, the Russian leadership is nowadays framing its political struggle with the Western world in terms of what one might call “civilizational theory.” This rejects the Western model of history as progressing inevitably towards a common future, normally defined in terms of liberalism, and juxtaposes to it the idea that history consists of multiple different civilizations each advancing according to its own logic. This concept provides a justification for why not just Russia, but also other parts of the world, can resist Western hegemony and assert their right to develop in their own way.

Over the past decade, civilizational theory has been gradually appearing more and more in official Russian rhetoric. Last week proved the point, with the publication of a new foreign policy concept for the Russian Federation, along with an executive order by Russian President Vladimir Putin approving the concept.

In his order, Putin firmly nailed his colours to the civilizational mast. Russia, he declared, was an “original state-civilization, a vast Eurasian and Euro-Pacific power that bound together the Russian people and other peoples who make up the cultural and civilizational community of the Russian world.” This itself was nothing particularly new, but some of what then followed was.

For Putin’s decree specifically pointed to Russia’s status as the “legal successor of the Soviet Union” and as such a state with a “long role in the creation of the contemporary system of international relations and in the liquidation of the global system of colonialism.” Putin continued: “Humanity is passing through a period of revolutionary change. … It is impossible to return to the past, unequal model of global development, which for centuries guaranteed the rapid economic growth of the colonial powers by exploiting the resources of dependent territories and states in Asia, Africa, and the Western hemisphere.” Power was shifting, said Putin, but “some states… refuse to recognize the reality of a multipolar world… and try to hold back the natural march of history.”

These statements mark an important shift in Russian strategy, as Putin has never before played the anti-colonial card with quite such fervour. This shift reflects the factor that the centre of gravity in the struggle with the West has now moved to the Global South. Russia needs the support, or at least the neutrality, of states of the developing world in order to stymie the West’s efforts to isolate it. The civilizational rhetoric and the appeal to the Soviet Union’s record in fighting colonialism are useful tools in this regard, and so far they seem to be quite successful. Outside of Europe, North America, Australasia, Japan, and South Korea—what one might call the “collective West”—few states are actively declaring themselves Russia’s supporters, but almost none are lining up to join the West as active enemies. Not even Mexico has levied sanctions against Russia.

The Russians are enjoying particular success in Africa. In February, for instance, South Africa hosted the Russian and Chinese navies for joint exercises. And in March, representatives of 40 African countries attended a meeting in Moscow held in preparation for the Russia-Africa summit that is to take place in St. Petersburg in July, and that most African heads-of-state are expected to attend. At the Moscow meeting, Putin told the African delegates that it was “common knowledge that the Soviet Union provided significant support to the peoples of Africa in their fight against colonialism, racism and apartheid, how it helped many African countries to gain and protect their sovereignty, and consistently supported them in building their statehood, strengthening defence capabilities, laying the foundations of their national economies and workforce training.” In response, the delegates applauded.

Putin’s message fell on fertile ground. Russia won many friends in the Third World during the COVID crisis by providing them with its Sputnik vaccine. It is also investing heavily in the African continent, while the Wagner private military company is active in a number of African countries, whose governments have hired it to help fight domestic insurgencies. All this is having an effect. A report issued last month by the Economist Intelligence Unit noted that one year after the start of the war in Ukraine “an increasing number of countries are siding with Russia.” The report assesses that only 15 percent of the world’s population lives in countries condemning Russia, and another 21 percent in countries that are “West-leaning.” Just 5.6 percent live in countries “supportive of Russia,” but 27.5 percent are “Russia-leaning,” with 30 percent neutral. Overall, therefore, the numbers pro- and anti-Russia are roughly even, but the tide seems to be drifting slightly in favour of the former. Russian foreign policy vis-à-vis the West is in tatters. Elsewhere, however, its diplomacy is proving quite effective. It is a fact with which the West sooner or later is going to have to come to terms.