Censorship, fake news, perception management

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 21, 2022 2:37 pm

ASPI – The Gov’t-Funded Conspiracist Think Tank Now Controlling Your Social Media Feed
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 20, 2022
Alan Macleod

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That ASPI is now partially in charge of Twitter’s moderation, influencing what hundreds of millions of people see daily, is a grave threat to the free flow of information, as well as to the chances for a peaceful 21st century.

CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA –Social media giant Twitter raised many eyebrows recently when it announced that it had partnered with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in its fight against disinformation and fake news. ASPI, Twitter revealed in a blog post, had helped identify thousands of accounts that “amplified Chinese Communist Party narratives” around China’s treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. These accounts have now been permanently deleted.

This is of concern because the ultra-hawkish Australian think tank is actually the source for many of the most incendiary claims about China and its foreign policy, and, as Australian journalist and filmmaker John Pilger told MintPress, has been a driving force in the ramping up of tensions between China and the West, something he explored in his 2016 documentary, “The Coming War on China.” Pilger stated that,

ASPI has played a leading role – some would say, the leading role – in driving Australia’s mendacious and self-destructive and often absurd China-bashing campaign. The current Coalition government, perhaps the most right-wing and incompetent in Australia’s recent history, has relied upon the ASPI to disseminate Washington’s desperate strategic policies, into which much of the Australian political class, along with its intelligence and military structures, has been integrated.”

Importantly, neither ASPI nor Twitter claimed that the deleted accounts were fake or operated by the Chinese state, strongly implying that merely agreeing with Beijing or questioning bellicose Western narratives was reason enough to be banned.

This is not the first time that Twitter has joined forces with ASPI. In 2020, it announced that, on the think tank’s recommendations, it had shut down more than 170,000 accounts that praised China’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, generally “antagoniz[ed]” the U.S., or amplified “deceptive narratives” about the Hong Kong protests (i.e., ones that did not agree with the State Department or the 44% of Hong Kongers who supported the movement). In the same cull, Twitter also deleted thousands of Russian and Turkish accounts.

That a global social media platform is now in open partnership with ASPI should trouble anyone who is concerned with free speech or peace, as the think tank is funded by the U.S. government and the world’s largest weapons manufacturers, and has consistently agitated for global conflict.

Faux independence

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute describes itself as an “independent, non-partisan think tank” whose mission is to “nourish public debate and understanding” and “better inform” the public, as well as to “produce expert and timely advice for Australian and global leaders.” It insists that it is not identified with any particular ideology and that it is committed to “publishing a range of views on contentious topics.”

Despite claiming to be independent, it also notes that it was established in 2001 by the Australian government, the sole owner of the organization. This represents a PR problem for the think tank, which warns that “the perception as well as the reality of that independence…need to be carefully maintained.” Its annual financial reports reveal that most of its funding comes straight from Canberra, although it also receives hefty donations from other governments including the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan and the Netherlands.

While the lion’s share of its funding comes from various sources within the Australian government, the vast majority of its overseas funding comes from Washington and, more specifically, the Department of Defense (over $700,000 in fiscal year 2020-21) and the State Department (around $430,000 over the same period). In addition, ASPI takes money from American tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Facebook.

For many, including veteran Australian diplomat Bruce Haigh, this foreign cash has fundamentally sullied the organization. Haigh told MintPress:

ASPI is the propaganda arm of the CIA and the U.S. government. It is a mouthpiece for the Americans. It is funded by the American government and American arms manufacturers. Why it is allowed to sit at the center of the Australian government when it has so much foreign funding, I don’t know. If it were funded by anybody else, it would not be where it is at.”

As Haigh noted, ASPI is also funded by a cavalcade of the world’s largest weapons companies, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, QinetiQ and Thales. Perhaps even more worryingly, many of ASPI’s key personnel moonlight as defense contractor executives. Indeed, almost half of its senior council are on the boards of weapons or cybersecurity firms.

Robert Hill is a case in point. As Minister of Defense between 2001 and 2006, he was one of the key figures driving Australia towards war in Iraq. Hill consistently lied to the public, claiming that it was “not in dispute” that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and that the occupation, in fact, saved many Iraqi lives. One former senior defense advisor, Jane Errey, claims she was even forced out of her job after she refused to lie to the media on Hill’s behalf about Iraqi WMDs. Today, he is on the board of Rheinmetall Defense Australia, a company that supplies fighting vehicles and ammunition to the Australian military.

Hill’s successor as defense minister, Brendan Nelson, is also on ASPI’s senior council. Nelson continued Australia’s collaboration in the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, although his loose tongue got him in trouble in 2007, when he casually stated that the reason Australia was in Iraq was not WMDs, as Hill had insisted, but in order to secure a slice of the country’s oil reserves for itself. “Energy security is extremely important to all nations throughout the world and, of course, in protecting and securing Australia’s interests,” he said, in response to a direct question about whether this was a war for oil.

While director of the Australian War Memorial – a monument to those who died in Australia’s wars, Nelson controversially allowed weapons companies Boeing, Thales, Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems to sponsor the institution, a decision critics allege turned it from a sober memorial into a glorification of war. Just weeks after stepping down from that position, he accepted a job as president of Boeing Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific, a title he still holds.

Michelle Fahy, an investigative journalist specializing in the Australian arms industry, was particularly concerned by Nelson’s position at ASPI, telling MintPress:

Along with the funding, it is hard to see how this board appointment fits with a claim to being an ‘independent’ organization when Boeing is a multi-billion-dollar, top-five contractor to the Australian Defense Department, the third largest arms manufacturer in the world, and Nelson was formerly Defense Minister in an earlier government of the same political party now in power.”

Thus, a group headed by the individuals who championed the biggest political deception of the 21st century – one that led to the deaths of 2.4 million people – is now in charge of deciding what is real and what is fake news online for the entire planet. This raises a question: if ASPI had similar control over the means of communication in the early 2000s, would voices questioning the legitimacy of the Iraq invasion have been silenced for promoting false narratives?

Lt. Gen. Ken Gillespie was Vice Chief of the Defense Force from 2005-2008 and then Chief of the Army – the highest military position in Australia – between 2008 and 2011. As such, Gillespie was central to Australia’s efforts in both Afghanistan and Iraq. As his own LinkedIn biography boasts, “I led the initial Australian Defense Force contribution into the Middle-East and Afghanistan in the aftermath of the September 11 strikes on the U.S.A. I was a key planner for Australia’s contribution to the Iraq war, and I commanded all Australian Defense Force operations for a lengthy period.” Both Gillespie and fellow ASPI council member Jane Halton are on the board of Naval Group Australia, producer of warships and other combat systems. They both also work for cybersecurity companies; Gillespie is director of the Senetas Corporation, a cybersecurity firm that regularly partners with weapons manufacturers, such as Thales, that have heartily endorsed Senetas’ work. Meanwhile, Halton is chair of the board of directors at Vault Cloud, a defense-minded cybersecurity firm.

Another ASPI council member is former politician Gai Brodtmann. Brodtmann serves on the advisory board of cybersecurity firm Sapien Cyber, a firm that has secured a number of large military contracts and is chaired by former Minister of Defense Stephen Smith. In addition to this, she holds a senior position at Defense Housing Australia, a company that provides a range of services aimed at military personnel.

One of the newest members of ASPI’s council is James Brown, an ex-army officer and son-in-law of former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Brown is chief executive officer of the Space Industry Association of Australia (SIAA), an organization that represents the interests of a number of prominent weapons corporations, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman Australia and Saab Australia.

As Fahy noted in an article in Declassified Australia, many former ASPI council members had similarly questionable connections to the arms industry. Jim McDowell was chief executive of BAE Systems Australia. Fellow politicians Stephen Loosley and Allan Hawke were on the boards of Thales Australia and Lockheed Martin Australia respectively, at the same time as serving on ASPI’s council. Meanwhile, retired Vice-Marshal Margaret Staib was on British aerospace giant QinetiQ’s board.

ASPI’s pro-war teenage growth spurt

ASPI began life 20 years ago as a relatively small think tank with a mandate to produce timely and independent research. However, in recent years, the organization has ballooned in size and now employs dozens of full-time staffers (contrary to its original vision). Its aggressive targeting of funding from a wide range of sources has undermined its credibility in Fahy’s eyes. As she told MintPress:

ASPI’s charter requires it to work to maintain the perception as well as the actuality of its independence. Given the widespread criticism directed at ASPI in recent years due to the perceived excessive influence of the U.S. government and U.S. arms and cybersecurity multinationals on its output, there is little doubt that the perception of its independence has been lost.”

Nevertheless, its ascendancy has led to it carrying inordinate influence within Australian politics and beyond, the organization’s reports being frequently cited in major outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post and Fox News. Diplomat Haigh said:

ASPI has supplanted the Department of Foreign Affairs in advice to the government. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, [Marise] Payne, is really very weak, and has been bypassed. So ASPI is feeding straight into the prime minister’s office on matters of foreign policy, particularly as it relates to China…This is part of the militarization of Australia and the Australian public service.”

Unsurprisingly for an organization taking money from weapons contractors, ASPI publishes some of the most crude and relentlessly pro-war propaganda anywhere, and has been a leader in the rush to declare a new Cold War on China and Russia.

This militaristic attitude is exemplified by ASPI’s executive director, Peter Jennings. Last year, Jennings bitterly denounced President Joe Biden and his decision to pull out of Afghanistan, describing it as his “first big blunder” in office. Jennings confidently predicted that Biden’s assessment that the U.S. “could not create or sustain a durable Afghan government” would be proven wrong. “In fact, that is precisely what American, Australian and other forces delivered to Afghanistan: a flawed but functioning democracy, keeping the Taliban at bay and preventing groups such as al-Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a training base from which to attack the West,” he wrote. Later that year, the Afghan government would fall to the Taliban, only days after American troops finally withdrew.

In the same article, Jennings went on to state that Biden’s decision was “an abandonment as complete as the U.S. failure to back South Vietnam…in the face of North Vietnam’s advancing conventional forces in 1974 and 1975,” thereby signaling that he supported the Vietnam conflict as well.

Indeed, it is hard to find a war Jennings has not advocated for. He vociferously backed the Iraq War, even demanding in 2015 that Australia increase its troop numbers. A committed cold-warrior who has argued that “the West is setting the bar for military response too high” and that the world must stop the “Leninist autocracies” of ​​Russia, Iran and Syria, last week he came close to calling for war against nuclear-armed Russia. “America’s credibility is on the line” in Ukraine, he thundered, demanding that Biden back up his talk with “believable military options.”

An arms producers’ Yellow Pages

For a think tank that was supposed to produce nonpartisan, expert advice, it is remarkable how far ASPI strays from this goal, going so far as to run advertisements for weapons manufacturers masquerading as serious analysis. One example of this is a 2020 study, titled “Australia needs to ensure it has the advanced missiles it needs.” Comparing death machines to crucial lifesaving equipment, it states:

Missiles are like a combination of a medical ventilator and the masks health workers need during a pandemic…You need many thousands of them and they can’t be reused. Ordering or holding a few hundred just doesn’t cut any mustard outside peacetime training routines. So, production is key.

“Without such weapons,” the author continues, “Islamic State might still control major chunks of territory in Iraq and Syria.” This claim, of course, ignores the fact that it was largely Iranian forces under Qassem Soleimani that were responsible for destroying ISIS, and that the United States assassinated him in 2020. ASPI chief Peter Jennings appeared to support Trump’s decision, writing that “it’s surely a positive that, after Soleimani’s death, bad actors in the region might pause to wonder if a Hellfire missile on a circling drone has their name and address programmed in.”

Hammering the point home, ASPI claims that “Australia is fortunate in having close relationships with…companies like Raytheon, Rafael, Lockheed Martin and Kongsberg” that can close the country’s supposed “missile supply gap.” “Getting agreement to and support for high-end U.S. missiles, like the long-range anti-ship missile made by Lockheed Martin, to be manufactured in Australia as well as the continental U.S. through co-production, will only happen if the senior leadership of our nations drive it,” it concludes.

If it were not clear that this was a “buy more missiles, says group funded by missile manufacturers” advertisement, ASPI included both Thales’ and Lockheed Martin’s logos on the page. Indeed, every page on ASPI’s website includes a sidebar advertisement for those two companies, complete with links to their websites.

These sorts of practices would be problematic enough if ASPI were a think tank trying to promote orange juice drinking in Australia while being filled with executives from Tropicana and Minute Maid. But it is not fruit ASPI is selling: it is war. It is literally a life-and-death affair.

Red flags, Yellow Peril

Saber-rattling at Russia or running unofficial advertorials for weapons companies are sidelines to ASPI’s main business of hyping up the threat that China poses to Australia and the world. Earlier this month, Jennings took to the pages of The Australian to demand a more formal military alliance with Japan in order to take China head-on. The Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper failed to disclose the fact that Jennings’ organization – and therefore his hefty salary (around $332,000 last year) – is being directly paid in part by the Japanese government. He has also recently called for a diplomatic boycott of the upcoming Beijing Winter Olympics.

ASPI was the source behind the infamous 2019 documentary “Red Flags,” which aired on state broadcaster ABC. In McCarthyist fashion, “Red Flags” claimed that Australian universities were “infiltrated” with thousands of agents of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), learning Australian secrets and bringing them back to their homeland. ASPI’s report, “Picking Flowers, Making Honey,” insisted that universities were in active “collaboration” with the CCP.

I grew up in the cold war. Third-rate academics and a rag bag of charlatans made fools of themselves with their mighty conspiracy theory of Chinese (aka the Yellow Peril) under our beds. They’re back! This lot, the ASPI, echoes Trump’s lies and racism.https://t.co/Ir9HZ3D2yP

— John Pilger (@johnpilger) June 18, 2020


The Canberra-based think tank was also behind the scaremongering that led to the Australian government canceling Huawei’s contract to upgrade the country’s notoriously poor telecommunications infrastructure. Adding to the hype, one ASPI employee even took to the pages of a national newspaper to claim that if the small city of Bendigo went forward with its plans to attach Huawei sensors to their garbage trucks, it would constitute a national security threat.

Jennings hailed the government’s subsequent decision to cancel the nation’s 5G plans as “absolutely the right call,” categorizing those opposing it as simply “the inevitable whining from China’s red brigade of useful idiots.” At no point did he acknowledge that telecom giants who fund ASPI, and on whose boards many of its key members sit, would likely benefit from the decision.

I met ASPI acolyte Vicky Xu today at the cab line at the airport. When I explained I’m concerned we’re heading to war with China she said, “We’re already at war with China.” I said, “No, a real war.” She replied, “I’m in a real war with China.” ASPI has a lot to answer for, IMHO.

— Robert Barwick (@RobbieBarwick) April 14, 2021


Last summer, ASPI also published a report with the title “China threatens Australia with missile attack.” The basis of the “threat,” was not China, however, but a two-paragraph statement from Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of a Chinese newspaper, The Global Times. Hu wrote that if Australia declared war on China, sent troops to Taiwan, and started killing Chinese soldiers, then China should have the capability to fire back on Australia. The author of the piece, Paul Dibb, the former head of Australia’s equivalent of the Defense Intelligence Agency, surely knew the difference but did not let that get in the way of a good story.

Dibb himself has openly ramped up tensions between the two nations. In 2020, he wrote an article for ASPI entitled “How Australia can deter China.” The article was illustrated simply with a picture of a Lockheed Martin missile. Pilger told MintPress:

ASPI is one of the world’s most blatant propaganda ciphers. If we were back in the old Cold War, it would be the equivalent of Pravda – though my memory of Pravda is that it was honest in its role as a voice of the state whereas ASPI pretends to be independent.”

For a think tank that claims to be a guardian against fake news and disinformation online, ASPI has been at the forefront of mainstreaming conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and China, particularly that of the Wuhan lab leak. In a report called “The Great Covid Cover-up,” ASPI insisted that there has been massive, worldwide collusion on the part of the scientific, academic and medical communities, and even from parts of the U.S. government, all to hide Covid’s true origins and to run interference for China.

Perhaps most importantly, however, ASPI is a worldwide driving force behind bringing the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang to global attention. Their many reports, particularly the ongoing Xinjiang Data Project, have been the basis of hundreds of articles and news segments across the planet. Unfortunately, much of their research is as sloppy as it has been with other projects. As soon as it released an interactive map of the locations of what it claimed were hundreds of Uyghur detention centers, local Chinese people and even just individuals using tools like Google were able to show conclusively that many of these “prisons” were actually schools, government offices, or other more mundane edifices.

ASPI’s report’s Turpan Detention Center Facility #7 & Facility #1 turn out to be Gaochang District Bureau for Veterans Affairs and Gaochang District Bureau for Business & Industry Informationisation respectively. The smoking gun is that they both have external walls! https://t.co/yb3LTz9wvA pic.twitter.com/WuRprk4Bih

— Chengxin Pan (@ChengxinPan) September 27, 2020


Of course, this is not to say that no detention facilities exist, or that a great number of Uyghurs have not been oppressed or imprisoned. Even the Chinese government accepts that it has put large numbers of people through what it describes as deradicalization programs. What it does highlight, though, is the sloppy nature of the scholarship that is being used to justify a worldwide boycott of Xinjiang-linked companies on the grounds of forced labor, something ASPI has helped lead. Thus, ASPI is far from a neutral arbiter in Twitter’s decision to close thousands of accounts on the grounds of stopping misinformation about Xinjiang spreading; in fact, it is serving as the prosecutor, the judge and the executioner all at once.

Ironically, at least 11 of the think tank’s largest financial backers are themselves heavily implicated in using forced labor to produce their weapons, or in human trafficking. Boeing, Raytheon, BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin all make use of forced American prison labor to make their products, while certain national sponsors, including the United States and the UAE, engage in forced labor.

The organization that constantly attacks China was also among the driving forces behind the yearslong RussiaGate conspiracy in the United States. ASPI agents were flown across the world to provide supposedly expert testimony to the U.S. Senate hearings about alleged Russian interference online and in the 2016 election. Remarkably, ASPI’s report, “Hacking Democracies,” claims that only Russia and China interfere in other nations’ elections, blithely ignoring the long history of the American government doing just that.

Facing mounting criticism at home, ASPI has inexpertly attempted to launder its own image online. The organization was caught scrubbing negative information off its Wikipedia page while using an ASPI-registered I.P. address. A number of users editing the page to add positive content and remove negative information were identified as sock puppets (fake accounts controlled by another user to give the impression of a group consensus) and banned by Wikipedia. Journalist Marcus Reubenstein also discovered that another pro-ASPI Wikipedia editor named “Wyvern2604” was originally called “ASPI ORG” before changing their name. This sort of crude online propaganda is exactly what ASPI accuses its enemies of engaging in. Yet, far from being discredited and having its accounts removed, ASPI is now a leader, supposedly, in the fight against disinformation – whether the public likes it or not.

Signing on to Bellum Americanum

Australia’s stance on China has taken a dramatic turn in recent years. Once, it had enjoyed a cordial relationship with Beijing and developed deep economic ties to it. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, in and out of office between 2007 and 2013, even impressed his Chinese counterparts with his fluent Mandarin.

Yet as the United States has turned its eye upon Beijing, Australia has followed suit, joining the U.S.-dominated military organizations like The Quad (U.S., Australia, Japan, India) and AUKUS (Australia, U.K., U.S.), both of which are squarely aimed at preventing China’s further economic rise. To that end, there is a concerted U.S. effort to develop what senior generals have called an “Asian NATO,” sooner rather than later.

Media have worked with ASPI to hype the China threat, while politicians not going along with this dangerous jingoism are labeled “panda huggers.” To that extent, it has had a profound impact on public opinion. As recently as 2018, 82% of Australians saw China as an “economic partner” rather than a “security threat” (12%). However, by 2021, those numbers had radically shifted; 63% considering China a threat, and only 34% describing it as an economic partner. Even Rudd himself has become something of a China hawk, describing the country as “a 1,000-pound gorilla in the front living room.”

Historically, Australia has consistently followed the United States into whatever military endeavor it begins. There were nearly 8,000 Australian soldiers in Vietnam at the war’s peak, the country suffering some 3,500 casualties. It also accompanied the U.S. during the First Gulf War and the two largest post-9/11 campaigns.

This continues to the present day. Late last year, Australia committed to purchasing eight enormous nuclear submarines at a cost of around $64 billion. The announcement was understood on all sides to be a gesture to Washington, showing that Australia will stand by it, come what may. Yet as China is by far and away Australia’s largest economic partner (almost one-third of all Australian exports go to the P.R.C.), any conflict would be devastating. Thus, the enthusiasm with which the government in Canberra has chosen the U.S. over China speaks wonders about what it sees its true role as being. As Pilger put it:

In the words of a senior CIA officer once based in Australia, Australian prime ministers are ‘forever obsequious to us.’ Up until 2015, the relationship with China was pragmatic and businesslike. China is Australia’s biggest, most important trader. The relationship is now a spectacle akin to aiming a pistol at one’s own feet.”

“Australia now has become very much a part of the American confrontation with China,” Haigh said. “The Americans are dead set keen to take on China. It is not a matter of ‘if,’ it is a matter of ‘when,’ because that is what they want to do. They have made their minds up… It’s gunboat diplomacy with aircraft carriers,” he added.

“Do you want me to drop this c***?”

Horrific Video shows Australian SAS soldier shooting and killing unarmed Afghan man at close range in #Afghanistan.#Australia #WarCrimeshttps://t.co/O3V6qfTjEE pic.twitter.com/gSzNiUAEum

— DOAM (@doamuslims) March 18, 2020


The think tank-social media axis

Twitter’s collaboration with ASPI is part of a growing trend for the biggest social media platforms partnering with hawkish, state-sponsored think tanks. In 2018, Facebook announced it was collaborating with NATO think tank the Atlantic Council, whereby it gave an undisclosed amount of control over users’ news feeds to the group, allowing it to help Facebook decide what posts users saw and which ones were suppressed.

If anything, the Atlantic Council’s connections to state power are even deeper than ASPI’s. The council’s board of directors is a who’s who of powerful state figures – including senior statespersons like Condoleezza Rice and Henry Kissinger; a host of top U.S. generals, including Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis, Wesley Clark, and David Petraeus; as well as no fewer than seven former directors or acting directors of the CIA. Like ASPI, the Atlantic Council receives its funding from Western governments, weapons manufacturers, and big tech companies. As such, it represents the collective consciousness of the American state.

The Atlantic Council, like ASPI, has also been central to the rush towards potential war with Russia or China, the organization constantly putting out highly questionable reports of Russian or Chinese interference in domestic politics. Last February, the Atlantic Council published an anonymous, 26,000-word report outlining its vision for a future China. “The United States and its major allies continue to dominate the regional and global balance of power across all the major indices of power;” it wrote, hoping as well that head of state Xi Jinping will be “replaced by a more moderate party leadership; and that the Chinese people themselves have come to question and challenge the Communist Party’s century-long proposition that China’s ancient civilization is forever destined to an authoritarian future.” In other words, that China has been broken and that some sort of regime change has occurred.

A week later, Facebook hired former NATO press officer and current senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, Ben Nimmo, to “lead global threat intelligence strategy against influence operations” and “emerging threats.” Nimmo specifically named Iran and Russia as potential dangers to the platform.

Another former Atlantic Council hawk turned social media boss is Reddit’s Jessica Ashooh. Ashooh left her job as deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Strategy Force to become Reddit’s director of policy – a position for which she was completely unqualified on paper.


A second, highly significant example of Twitter collaboration with state intelligence is the case of Gordon MacMillan. MacMillan is an active-duty officer in the British Army’s 77th Brigade, a unit dedicated to online operations and psychological warfare, yet was somehow appointed to become Twitter’s Head of Editorial. Despite his outing being covered extensively in alternative media (including in MintPress News), only one mainstream U.S. publication – Newsweek – even mentioned the revelations at all. The Newsweek journalist who wrote the story was forced out of the industry only a few weeks later. Yet to this day, MacMillan remains in his important post at Twitter, strongly suggesting the social media company knew of his role before he was hired.

Ultimately, what these incidents hint at is a fusion between social media and the national security state, something that the Twitter/ASPI union underlines. This has long been foreseen, even championed by both entities. At NATO’s 70th anniversary gala in 2019, Admiral James Stavridis, former NATO supreme commander for Europe, declared that his organization would very soon be “far more engaged” with tech and cybersecurity issues. But long before then, executives at Google were pitching their company as a new weapon for the U.S. empire. “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies [like Google] will be to the twenty-first,” wrote Eric Schmidt and Larry Cohen in their book, The New Digital Age, a book that came replete with a ringing endorsement from Henry Kissinger on the back cover.

Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are far more widely used and influential than any newspaper or TV network. Whoever controls their algorithms and has the power to promote or delete accounts at will has significant influence over global public opinion; hence the desire to control them. When an organization like ASPI or the Atlantic Council has even some amount of editorial control over social media, that is tantamount to state censorship, but on a worldwide scale.

This power is already being used in a flagrantly anti-democratic manner. Just days before the Nicaraguan presidential election in November, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram worked, seemingly in unison, to essentially wipe the left-wing FSLN Party (a longtime bête noire

of the U.S.) from the internet, purging thousands of accounts, channels and pages at the most politically sensitive time. Activists who had been suspended by Facebook for “inauthentic behavior” (i.e., being bots) poured on to Twitter, recording messages stating they were real people who supported President Daniel Ortega. Incredibly, Twitter took the decision to delete virtually all these accounts, too.

That Twitter intends more of these types of operations in the future is made clear by the fact that they announced partnerships with two other organizations at the same time as with ASPI. One is Venezuelan outlet, Cazadores de Fake News, a group that presents itself as a fact-checking organization but appears to be inordinately dedicated to attacking the left-wing government of Nicolas Maduro (another American target). Cazadores de Fake News tacitly endorsed the self-declared president, Juan Guaidó, a favorite of Washington. It was also supportive of the U.S.-backed military coup that briefly brought Bolivia’s Jeanine Añez to power in 2019. The other organization partnering with Twitter is the Stanford Internet Observatory, a group that boasts about training a new generation of (anti-Russian) leaders in Ukraine and whose director, Alex Stamos, is also on the advisory board of NATO’s Collective Cybersecurity Center of Excellence.

While the Australian Strategic Policy Institute might have started out and even operated for years with the best of intentions, it is increasingly clear that its primary role is to create crises – fake or otherwise – to serve their backers’ agendas. Once weapons were manufactured to fight wars; today, wars are often manufactured to sell weapons.

The interests of the U.S. government and of arms companies are not those of either the Australian public or of social media users. Where once the online space was a place where critical information could circulate freely, we increasingly live in an upside down world where a giant government influence operation is being carried out under the guise of protecting us from a similarly large (foreign) government operation.

ASPI has become not only a prime vehicle driving the West to war, but it now also holds considerable power to suppress dissenting opinions, meaning it can simply invent reality. That this organization is now partially in charge of Twitter’s moderation, influencing what hundreds of millions of people see daily, is a grave threat to the free flow of information, as well as to the chances for a peaceful 21st century.

Feature photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Jan 26, 2022 2:24 pm

A 'Parthogenetic' Conflict - There Is No Russian Invasion Threat To Ukraine

With regards to the completely made up story of the 'imminent Russian invasion' of the Ukraine a commentator remarked to me:

What we are seeing is a 'parthogenetic' conflict/war/crisis. A first - to my recollection.
Indeed - the virgin birth of a conflict in which there is no enemy.

There is no threat of a Russian invasion of the Ukraine now or in the foreseeable future. Despite that today's New York Times has put no less than four 'invasion' stories at the top of its homepage.

Image

Here is more evidence that there is absolutely no indication of any Russian invasion of the Ukraine:

Mujtaba (Mij) Rahman @Mij_Europe - 14:36 UTC · Jan 24, 2022
Senior Elysée source tells me: “There is a kind of alarmism in Washington and London which we cannot understand. We see no immediate likelihood of Russian military action. We simply want our interpretation to be taken into account before a common western approach is agreed.”

---
Richard Hadley @FranceVotes - 15:50 UTC · Jan 24, 2022
Replying to @Mij_Europe

Elysée briefed 'same' to @PhilippRicard (21 Jan @lemondefr): ‘France, like Germany, remain puzzled by USA & UK alarmism'. A source is quoted: 'We see same number of lorries, tanks and people. We observed same manoeuvres, but can't conclude offensive is imminent from all that.'


Yesterday the BBC interviewed the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Oleksiy Danilov:

Some of our partners contribute to panic. This is beneficial to Russia - Danilov (machine translation)

Whether BBC News Ukraine asked the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleksiy Danilov whether there is a reason for panic or whether the Russian invasion is so real today and what the Ukrainian authorities are doing.

...
BBC: What is happening near the Ukrainian borders? Is the number of troops increasing, are they maneuvering?

Alexei Danilov: The number of Russian troops is not increasing in the form in which many people paint today. Do they have maneuvers there - yes, but they were in them all the time. This is their territory, they have the right to move left and right there. Is it unpleasant for us? Yes, it's unpleasant, but it's not news to us. If this is news to someone in the West, I apologize.

Likewise Ukraine's Defense Minister via TASS:

Ukrainian defense minister sees no threat of Russian invasion in near future
Alexey Reznikov said that a scenario of a Russian attack in the near future was also unlikely

KIEV, January 25. /TASS/. Ukrainian Defense Minister Alexey Reznikov said early on Tuesday he had received no information so far indicating the possibility of Russia’s invasion of his country in the near future.
"As of today, the armed forces of Russia created no strike groups, indicating they were ready to launch an offensive tomorrow," he told Ukraine’s ICTV television channel, adding that a scenario of a Russian attack in the near future was also unlikely.

When asked about the likelihood of Russia attacking Ukraine on February 20, the final day of the Olympic Games in Beijing, the minister said the probability was "low."


And this military analysis via the Kiev Independent:

Center for Defense Strategies: How likely is large-scale war in Ukraine? (analysis)
Editor’s note: This is an analysis by the Center of Defense Strategies’ experts Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Alina Frolova, Oleksiy Pavliuchyk. It was originally published in Ukrainian by Ukrainska Pravda. The Kyiv Independent has translated it and is republishing it with permission.


How realistic is the scenario of a full-scale offensive into all or most of Ukraine in the near future?

At the moment, there are not enough Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders and no fully formed military groups needed to conduct a strategic offensive against Ukraine.

According to our estimates, supported by many of the indicators below, a large-scale general military operation can’t take place for at least the next two or three weeks.

As of Jan. 23, we do not observe the required formation of several hundred thousand troops, not only on the border with Ukraine, but also on Russian territory behind the front line.

Besides, we do not see the creation of strategic reserve units, nor the mobilization of the necessary connections and units on the basis of the centers for mobilization deployment.

Russian troops move mainly as battalion tactical groups (mechanized, tank and airborne troops) and tactical groups (artillery, multiple launch missile systems).

Russia hasn’t completed the formation of groups of troops in operational areas. It also hasn’t established and tested its wartime administration system.

If Russia was conducting preparations for a large-scale invasion, it would have been much more noticeable.

Therefore, what we currently have is the military threat posed by about 127,000 Russian servicemen along Ukraine’s borders, in the occupied territories of eastern Ukraine, and in Crimea. This number has not increased since April, and is not enough for a full-scale offensive.
...
How likely is an invasion in 2022?

In general, a large-scale Russian offensive operation against Ukraine in 2022 seems unlikely according to many indicators, even judging by purely military requirements.

...

The story of Russian preparations for an invasion of the Ukraine is made up from whole cloth.

It was peddled in early November with cropped satellite images which pretended that equipment parked next to regular long term Russian barracks was newly moved there in preparation of a war.

Based on such pictures Politico, for example, headlined on November 1:

Satellite images show new Russian military buildup near Ukraine
The deployments come as tension is rising between Moscow and the West.

New commercial satellite photos taken on Monday confirm recent reports that Russia is once again massing troops and military equipment on the border with Ukraine after a major buildup this spring.
The new images taken by Maxar Technologies and shared with POLITICO show a buildup of armored units, tanks and self-propelled artillery along with ground troops massing near the Russian town of Yelnya close to the border of Belarus. The units, which began moving in late September from other areas of Russia where they are normally based, include the elite 1st Guards Tank Army.


Yelnya is 250 kilometers (150 mi) north of the nearest Ukrainian border, not 'close' to it.

The piece included this picture:

Image

The picture shows parts of the regular storage area of the 144th Mechanized Division near Yelnya, Smolensk Oblast. The divisions was established in 2016-2017 on the basis of the former 28th Mechanized Brigade (Yekaterinburg).

This is a large formation with hundreds of vehicles. The division's forces include i.a. two mechanized regiments, one tank regiment, one recon battalion, one self-propelled artillery regiment, one anti-tank artillery battalion as well as supplementary forces.

Here is an uncropped picture of the whole area. It shows large size barracks at the top right and parking grounds for each of its subunits. The barracks roads and facilities were not built over night. The above picture was cropped to only show the lower middle part of the picture below.

Image

Another picture that was circulated widely to demonstrate that Russia is 'bolstering forces along Ukraine border' is this one:

Image

It shows parts of the 237th Tank Regiment near Soloti, Belgorod Oblast, Russia. The picture is cropped so that it does not show the troop quarters which prove that the tanks are parked next to the unit's barracks where they belong during peacetime. Here is an uncropped image from Google maps:

Image

Again - those barracks were not built over night. They are long-term facilities. The 237th Tank Regiment is stationed in Valuyki and Soloti. It has 90+ tanks, 40+ infantry fighting vehicles, 18 howitzers, 8 mortars. It consists of three tank battalions, one mechanized battalion, one sniper company, one recon company, one self-propelled howitzer battalion and one air defence battalion.

All such units also have lots of trucks to carry the ammunition, fuel and other supplies they need. All together those vehicles are clearly sufficient to fill that large parking lot.

The pictures that were supposed to show a 'new Russian military buildup' only showed units in their regular barracks were they have been stationed for years.

None of the units seen in them is deployed in a build-up-to-war like manner.

Posted by b on January 25, 2022 at 14:38 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/01/a ... .html#more

Italics+bold added.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 28, 2022 2:31 pm

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Graphika founder and CEO John Kelly testifies before the Senate with other leaders in the private intellegence community. Photo | AP | MPN

Graphika: The Deep State’s Beard for Controlling the Information Age
Posted Jan 28, 2022 by Alan MacLeod

Originally published: MintPress News (January 25, 2022 )

Graphika is the toast of the town. The private social-media and tech-intelligence agency that tracks down bots and exposes foreign influence operations online is constantly quoted, referenced and profiled in the nation’s most important outlets. For example, in 2020, The New York Times published a fawning profile of the company’s head of investigations, Ben Nimmo. “He Combs the Web for Russian Bots. That Makes Him a Target,” ran its headline, the article presenting him as a crusader risking his life to keep our internet safe and free. Last year, business magazine Fast Company labeled Graphika as among the 10 most innovative companies in the world.

There is no doubt that Graphika leans into this cool and dynamic corporate image. From its beginnings in 2013, the company has expanded to employ dozens of people at its trendy Manhattan office. Describing themselves as “cartographers of the internet age,” the company puts out investigation after investigation about foreign influence operations online, especially concentrating on Russian, Chinese or Iranian attempts to manipulate social media. A layperson could certainly be blinded by its science and impressed by the complex and innovative graphs and charts. Yet when it comes to similar but far larger U.S. government programs, the intelligence and analysis agency is silent.

The magnets around Graphika’s compass

One reason for this could be that Graphika is directly funded and staffed by those same American organizations. The New York-based company is not particularly transparent about its sources of income; however, on its website, it lists the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Minerva Initiative – a research program under the Department of Defense – as its chief “partners” in funding. Government records show it also sought and received $3 million in grants from the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force over the previous two fiscal years.

In addition to this, Graphika has partnered with a number of organizations, including the Atlantic Council, a NATO-offshoot think tank funded by the arms industry and the U.S. government. The Atlantic Council has been at the forefront of both vigorously wiping pages and accounts critical of the U.S. government and spreading lurid accusations about the power of Russia to influence foreign elections and media. Graphika and the Atlantic Council have joined forces on a number of different projects, including a 2019 joint report, on social media bots. The two organizations are also a part of the Election Integrity Partnership, a group that purports to protect the American political system from fake news. Another member of that group (and a listed partner of Graphika on its website) is the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), an organization perhaps most famous for its work in convincing Twitter to delete accounts for the crime of “undermining faith in the NATO alliance.” The SIO is led by Alex Stamos, who is on the board of NATO’s Collective Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. In addition, Graphika lists among its partners The Syria Campaign, an organization dedicated to drumming up support and funding for the controversial group the White Helmets.

And inside its compass

If this is the chief organization trusted to keep us safe from bad-faith state actors, there is already a significant problem. Perhaps most worryingly from an internet freedom angle, however, is the fact that Graphika is staffed in large part by former intelligence agents from the alphabet soup of three-letter agencies in Washington.

| Chris Bane worked for the CIA for over two decades before taking charge at Graphika | MR OnlineChief among these is strategy executive Chris Bane. Prior to joining Graphika, Bane spent 24 years in the CIA and seven in the U.S. Army, where he became an infantry and chemical officer. Another former spook is the director of federal programs, JoAnn Perry, who served for three and a half years at the CIA as an intelligence analyst advising policymakers on Middle Eastern affairs. Meanwhile, Lauren Pencek, the company’s vice president of finance and operations, worked at the NSA, eventually rising to become the agency’s director of corporate strategy. Before her time at the NSA, she worked for four years at arms manufacturer Northrop Grumman.

Pencek’s career history underlines the connections between the national security state, the weapons industry, and the emerging tech world. She is far from the only Graphika employee with a similar background. Director of investigations Tyler Williams, for example, spent nearly two years at BAE Systems and nearly seven at Booz Allen Hamilton before joining Graphika. At BAE Systems, he is said to have managed a portfolio of over $75 million for programs totaling more than $500 million. In another job at government contractor ANSER, Williams worked hand-in-hand with the Department of Homeland Security.

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Eugene Imas, Graphika’s senior analyst, worked for the Office of the Secretary of Defense before becoming team lead at Graphika

Eugene Imas, Graphika’s senior analyst and team lead, has also taken a very “spooky” career path. Studying Russian at Georgetown University (a school widely known as something akin to “CIA U”), Imas went on to work as a political and military analyst contractor for the Office of Secretary of Defense, where he provided intelligence for American war simulations against Russia. Meanwhile, Jennifer Mathieu spent more than 16 years in senior positions at defense contractor MITRE before switching to Graphika in August to become its chief technology/product officer.

Even Graphika’s staff with journalistic backgrounds have eyebrow-raising connections. Chris Hernon, who contributed to Graphika’s report on Russian influence operations, was a member of the U.K. government Institute for Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative, a secret group of hawkish journalists that the British intelligence establishment has used to plant false and coordinated stories into media around the world.

Connecting the worlds of the national security state, the defense industry, and social media is the aforementioned Ben Nimmo. In addition to his role at Graphika, Nimmo is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and was NATO’s press officer between 2011 and 2014. Last February, he was also appointed as intelligence chief for Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta. The coldest of cold warriors, Nimmo has accused everybody from Welsh pensioners to internationally-recognized Ukrainian pianists of being Russian bot accounts. Unfortunately, in his positions at the Atlantic Council and Meta, he is in a position to take action on his suspicions, allowing the botfinder general to act as prosecutor, judge and executioner.

The English Connection

An inordinate number of Graphika employees have been educated at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London – a notorious, intelligence-linked institution that MintPress News has profiled in depth. The Department of War Studies is the training ground for a huge number of NATO spies and, worryingly, journalists now working in politically sensitive areas such as Russia or the Middle East – a connection that suggests collusion between the national security state and the fourth estate.

A 2009 study published by the CIA extolled the virtues of sending its agents to King’s College London for advanced training from academics with “extensive and well-rounded intelligence experience.” “Exposure to an academic environment, such as the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, can add several elements that may be harder to provide within the government system,” it concluded. In 2013, former CIA Director and then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta gave a speech at the department, where he waxed lyrical about its importance to the agency and to the intelligence community more generally. “I deeply appreciate the work that you do to train and to educate our future national security leaders, many of whom are in this audience,” he said.

Graphika’s director of analysis, Melanie Smith, is one of many company employees who studied at the same foreign university department. Smith graduated with a master’s degree in Geopolitics, Terror and Security, a course that King’s College London itself makes clear is largely for military officers or spies. Since 2015, she has also been employed by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank funded by the arms industry and by a myriad of Western governments (including the United States).

Chair of the Advisory Board and Chief Innovation Officer Camille François is also a War Studies alumnus. A former special adviser to the Office of the French Prime Minister, she has also worked closely with DARPA in the United States and was selected in 2014 to train in “cyber operations” at the NATO School in Oberammergau, Germany. Her studies at Columbia University were paid for by the State Department and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Years later, she re-entered academia to attend the Department of War Studies, where, in 2019, she produced a report on the so-called Russian troll farm, the Internet Research Agency.

After five years in the U.S. military, Joseph Carter completed a master’s at the Department of War Studies. He later worked for Palantir and joined Graphika in 2019, becoming the company’s director of intelligence production.

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Joseph Carter spent nearly five years at Palantir, another firm with deep ties to the national security state, before joining Graphika

Certainly, the number of key Graphika individuals with deep connections to the national security state raises questions about the independence and neutrality of such an organization. Indeed, if there were any remaining doubts that the company functions as a front for the U.S. deep state, then its senior intelligence analyst Denitsa Nikolova removes them. Describing her job at Graphika on her professional LinkedIn profile, Nikolova writes (emphasis added):

Denitsa uses analytical methods and tools to study complex online networks in an effort to provide situational awareness to U.S. government clients. Denitsa specializes in surveying the online political environments of various countries in an effort to protect U.S. interests from coordinated and inauthentic online activity.

The description makes crystal clear that the organization exists to protect or promote not the public’s interests, but Washington’s. Prior to Graphika, Nikolova worked for the U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels and with former King’s College London War Studies Professor Thomas Rid on his book about Russian disinformation campaigns. Another Russia hawk, Rid was crucial in mainstreaming the increasingly gauche theory that Russia “hacked” the 2016 election, even testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the “dark art” of Russian meddling and condemning WikiLeaks and alternative media journalists as unwitting agents of disinformation.

The best defense… (is a good offense): the takedown of Corbyn

For all the talk of foreign interference in domestic politics, Graphika has weaponized its reporting in attempts to change public discourse around the world. In 2019, the anti-imperialist, pacifistic, NATO-skeptical Jeremy Corbyn was on the verge of becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom. Corbyn – who wanted to ditch nuclear weapons, radically raise taxes on the wealthy, pursue a path of dialogue with other nations, and establish a system of 21st-century socialism at home – represented a mortal threat to establishment interests.

With the help of the Integrity Initiative, there was a coordinated government-intelligence-media effort to destroy Corbyn, with claims that he was a secret Russian spy. The Atlantic Council described him as “the Kremlin’s Trojan horse.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo revealed that the U.S. was trying its “level best” to prevent a Corbyn victory. Meanwhile, a British Army general warned that if Corbyn’s Labour Party won the election, the military would stage a coup.

But Corbyn’s team had an ace up their sleeve. Just days before the election, it released 451 pages of documents of negotiations between Conservative government members and American corporations, showing that the Tories were in negotiations to sell off Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) to foreign interests. The revelation threatened to sink Boris Johnson.

Thankfully for Johnson, Graphika sprang into action, with Nimmo immediately announcing that the documents “closely resemble…a known Russian operation.” Within days, Graphika produced a long report insinuating that Corbyn was – wittingly or not – part of a Kremlin campaign.

At no point did anyone challenge the veracity of Corbyn’s documents. Nimmo and Graphika’s words, however, allowed the media to spin the story against Corbyn, so the national narrative shifted from “Tories selling off our precious NHS” to “Corbyn working with Russians to push propaganda,” thereby helping to torpedo the latter’s October Surprise and ensure years more of Conservative rule. In the cold light of 2022, the Johnson administration is indeed carrying out its plan to privatize the country’s healthcare system.

More recently, Graphika has also charged Iran with attempting to interfere in Scottish politics, especially on the question of independence, claiming the Islamic Republic was creating networks of inauthentic bots to push for a breakup of the United Kingdom. A further report alleged that a powerful Iranian influence operation was blaming the United States for its response to COVID-19 while praising China’s reaction, all the while pumping out pro-Iran and pro-Palestine propaganda.

Propaganda about propaganda

The Manhattan-based tech firm has been at the forefront of the establishment attack on alternative media, attempting to construct a non-existent link between left-wing sites, the Kremlin, and the Trump reelection campaign. In 2020, Nimmo and François wrote a report insinuating that a Russian government operation had infiltrated a host of well-known independent news sites, including MintPress, The GrayZone, InTheseTimes, and Common Dreams. The crux of the Graphika report claimed that a microblog called “Peace Data” was attempting to build an audience by “partner[ing]” with them and reposting their content. MintPress publishes under a Creative Commons license, meaning anyone can freely rehost content it produces, and there are a myriad of websites and microblogs that do just that. At the time, nobody at MintPress was even aware of Peace Data’s existence.

In its report, Graphika described MintPress as “a U.S.-based site with a focus on the Middle East that has​ described U.S. foreign policy as ‘an imperialist agenda that believes it’s possible for America to bomb its way out of every difficult situation.’” While there may be an element of truth to that description, from the context, it is clear that this is intended to scandalize the reader.

Without evidence, Graphika claimed that Peace Data was a Kremlin-controlled operation, noting that a sure giveaway was its “anti-Western tone” that “accused Western countries, the E.U. or NATO of imperialism or interference in other states,” its stance against the Saudi-led bombing of Yemen, and sympathy for the plight of Palestinians or Kashmiris. The implication of this, as The GrayZone’s Ben Norton noted, was clear:

If journalists acknowledge U.S. imperialism exists, report critically on Western foreign policy, or show sympathy toward Yemen, Palestine, and Kashmir, they are aiding and abetting the Kremlin.

The vast majority of Peace Data’s content was in Arabic, not English, and only 5% of its articles related to the 2020 U.S. elections at all, strongly indicating that this was not a Kremlin interference operation to get Trump elected. Furthermore, its reach was utterly minuscule, as even Graphika was forced to concede. A measure of this is the fact that its English-language Facebook page had only 198 Likes by the time it was closed down. If this was indeed an influence operation, it was incompetent and ineffectual, and certainly not worthy of so much attention from a hotshot New York intelligence firm. An individual could have reached a larger audience by talking loudly in a busy movie theater.

The attempts to link Peace Data to well known anti-war sites were also extremely weak. As Miles Kampf-Lassin, web editor at In These Times, noted on Twitter: “[T]he entirety of this attempt to ‘infiltrate and exploit’ In These Times by Russian trolls consists of a single email sent from a random address to our general submission email that was never responded to. Just so everyone is clear on what’s actually going on here.”


Despite the gaping holes in its methodology, the report caused a media storm. The New York Times published a series of long articles wherein it interviewed two of the only people to have written original content for Peace Data. Strangely, if this was truly a Russian influence operation, both men were Russia hawks affiliated with the right-wing of the Democratic Party. One had even worked for conservative Democratic Congressman Don Beyer.

The suspicions that this was actually an American guilt-by-association operation were increased after Peace Data released a response in laughably poor English – a statement that read far more like an American impersonating a Russian speaking English than a genuine Russian. There were no such glaring grammatical errors on Peace Data’s website, let alone in every sentence. Nevertheless, media around the world took the poor English to be a sure sign of a Russian influence operation, despite the fact that real Russian-backed outlets like Sputnikor RT do not make such errors.

A dissent-snuffing template?

The Graphika report is eerily similar to a 2016 investigation by a shadowy group calling itself ‘PropOrNot.” In the wake of the 2016 election shock, PropOrNot claimed to have used sophisticated “internet analytics tools” that had identified over 200 fake news websites that were “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda” – the implication being that they helped Trump win the election. Included on the list were WikiLeaks and Trump-supporting right-wing websites like The Drudge Report; anti-Trump websites that were also critical of Hillary Clinton, like MintPress News, Truthout and The Black Agenda Report; as well as libertarian vehicles like Antiwar.com and The Ron Paul Institute. In other words, any news source that was critical of the establishment.

A sure sign that you are reading Russian propaganda, PropOrNot claimed, was if the source criticizes Obama, Clinton, NATO, the “mainstream media,” or expresses reluctance to go to war with Russia. As PropOrNot explained,

Russian propaganda never suggests [conflict with Russia] would just result in a Cold War 2 and Russia’s eventual peaceful defeat, like the last time.

Despite refusing to show any methodology or even reveal who they were, PropOrNot’s claims caused a months-long media meltdown, and swiftly led organizations like Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter to radically alter their algorithms to promote “authoritative sources” and demote “borderline content.” The result was immediate. Overnight, alternative media and anti-establishment voices lost their audience. MintPress lost nearly 90% of its Google search traffic; AlterNet experienced a 63% reduction; Democracy Now! 36% and Truthout 25%.

As writer Caitlin Johnstone noted, censorship by algorithm does far more damage than conventional censorship, as it is far less noticeable. Ultimately, the PropOrNot saga allowed the establishment to tighten its grip on the means of communication and effectively shut out dissenting voices.

It is now almost certain that PropOrNot was not a neutral, independent organization, but the creation of Michael D. Weiss, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. A scan of PropOrNot’s website showed that it was controlled by The Interpreter, a magazine where Weiss is editor-in-chief. Furthermore, one investigator found hundreds of examples of the Twitter accounts of PropOrNot and Weiss using the identical and very unusual turn of phrase, strongly suggesting they were one and the same. Today, Weiss is a senior fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, alongside Graphika’s director of analysis, Melanie Smith.

The power of faux-neutrality

Even a cursory look at Graphika’s funding sources, the background of its staff, and its output should be enough to raise alarm bells about its motives and purpose. Graphika is funded by the U.S. national security state, staffed by “former” agents, and produces content that greatly furthers the national security state’s agenda. “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck,” so they say.

These semi-state actors play a very important role in today’s online landscape. In the 1970s, Graphika employees would likely be working for the CIA, producing internal reports for the U.S. government. The trick in the 21st century is to farm out this work to “private” companies funded in large part by the government and staffed with former agents, all the while presenting their findings as neutral, reliable and factual.

If this were the CIA or the NSA controlling social media and deleting hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Iranian or Russian accounts or suppressing domestic alternative media, there would be far more public pushback. Yet this gossamer-thin veil of neutrality from “independent” organizations has allowed a situation where the foxes have taken charge of the henhouse of online communications, promising to keep us safe from ineffective Russian operations, all the while bombarding us with propaganda that is helping drive us to the precipice of war.

https://mronline.org/2022/01/28/graphik ... ation-age/

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Censorship by Algorithm Does far More Damage Than Conventional Censorship
January 27, 2022
By Caitlin Johnstone – Jan 24, 2022

Journalist Jonathan Cook has a new blog post out on his experience with being throttled into invisibility by Silicon Valley algorithmic suppression that will ring all too familiar for any online content creators who’ve been sufficiently critical of official western narratives over the last few years.

“My blog posts once attracted tens of thousands of shares,” Cook writes. “Then, as the algorithms tightened, it became thousands. Now, as they throttle me further, shares can often be counted in the hundreds. ‘Going viral’ is a distant memory.”

“I won’t be banned,” he adds. “I will fade incrementally, like a small star in the night sky – one among millions – gradually eclipsed as its neighbouring suns grow ever bigger and brighter. I will disappear from view so slowly you won’t even notice.”

Cook says this began after the 2016 US election, which was when a major narrative push began for Silicon Valley corporations to eliminate “fake news” from their platforms and soon saw tech executives brought before the US Senate and told that they must “quell information rebellions” and come up with a mission statement expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord” online.

Arguably the most significant political moment in the United States since 9/11 and its immediate aftermath was when Democrats and their allied institutions concluded that Donald Trump’s election was a failure not of establishment politics but of establishment narrative control. From that point onwards, any online media creator who consistently disputes the narratives promoted by the same news outlets who’ve lied to us about every war has seen their view counts and new follows slashed.
“In case anyone wants to know how Facebook suppression works – I have 330,000 followers there but they’ve stopped showing my posts to many people,” Redacted Tonight host Lee Camp tweeted in January 2018. “I used to gain 6,000 followers a week. I now gain 500 and FB unsubscribes people without their knowledge – so my total number never increases.”I saw my own shares and view counts rapidly diminish in 2017 as well, and saw my new Facebook page follows suddenly slow to a virtual standstill. It wasn’t until I started using mailing lists and giving indie media outlets blanket permission to republish all my content that I was able to grow my audience at all.

And Silicon Valley did eventually admit that it was in fact actively censoring voices who fall outside the mainstream consensus. In order to disprove the false right-wing narrative that Google only censors rightist voices, the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet admitted in 2020 to algorithmically throttling World Socialist Website. Last year the CEO of Google-owned YouTube acknowledged that the platform uses algorithms to elevate “authoritative sources” while suppressing “borderline content” not considered authoritative, which apparently even includes just marginally establishment-critical left-of-center voices like Kyle Kulinski. Facebook spokeswoman Lauren Svensson said in 2018 that if the platform’s fact-checkers (including the state-funded establishment narrative management firm Atlantic Council) rule that a Facebook user has been posting false news, moderators will “dramatically reduce the distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on Facebook.”

People make a big deal any time a controversial famous person gets removed from a major social media platform, and rightly so; we cannot allow such brazen acts of censorship to become normalized. The goal is to normalize internet censorship on every front, and the powerful will push for that normalization to be expanded at every opportunity. Whether you dislike the controversial figure being deplatformed on a given day is entirely irrelevant; it’s not about them, it’s about expanding and normalizing internet censorship protocols on monopolistic government-tied speech platforms.

But far, far more consequential than overt censorship of individuals is censorship by algorithm. No individual being silenced does as much real-world damage to free expression and free thought as the way ideas and information which aren’t authorized by the powerful are being actively hidden from public view, while material which serves the interests of the powerful is the first thing they see in their search results. It ensures that public consciousness remains chained to the establishment narrative matrix.

It doesn’t matter that you have free speech if nobody ever hears you speak. Even in the most overtly totalitarian regimes on earth you can say whatever you want alone in a soundproof room.

That’s the biggest loophole the so-called free democracies of the western world have found in their quest to regulate online speech. By allowing these monopolistic megacorporations to become the sources everyone goes to for information (and even actively helping them along that path as in for example Google’s research grants from the CIA and NSA), it’s possible to tweak algorithms in such a way that dissident information exists online, but nobody ever sees it.

You’ve probably noticed this if you’ve tried to search YouTube for videos which don’t align with the official narratives of western governments and media lately. That search function used to work like magic; like it was reading your mind. Now it’s almost impossible to find the information you’re looking for unless you’re trying to find out what the US State Department wants you to think. It’s the same with Google searches and Facebook, and because those giant platforms dictate what information gets seen by the general public, that wild information bias toward establishment narratives bleeds into other common areas of interaction like Twitter as well.

The idea is to let most people freely share dissident ideas and information about empire, war, capitalism, authoritarianism and propaganda, but to make it increasingly difficult for them to get their content seen and heard by people, and to make their going viral altogether impossible. To avoid the loud controversies and uncomfortable public scrutiny brought on by acts of overt censorship as much as possible while silently sweeping unauthorized speech behind the curtain. To make noncompliant voices “disappear from view so slowly you won’t even notice,” as Cook put it.

The status quo is not working. Our ecosystem is dying, we appear to be rapidly approaching a high risk of direct military confrontation between nuclear-armed nations, and our world is rife with injustice, inequality, oppression and exploitation. None of this is going to change until the public begins awakening to the problems with the current status quo so we can begin organizing a mass-scale push toward healthier systems. And that’s never going to happen as long as information is locked down in the way that it is.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. And as more and more people get their information about what’s happening in the world from online sources, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation has already become one of the most consequential forms of narrative control.

https://orinocotribune.com/censorship-b ... ensorship/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 01, 2022 2:54 pm

Is Lockheed Martin Dictating Politico’s War Propaganda Articles in Secret? Hell No–They’re Doing it Right Out in the Open
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - January 27, 2022 3

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[Source: reddit.com]

Check out Politico’s latest “independent” news story designed to scare the bejeezus out of its readers and justify the cry for more and bigger military hardware contracts to fatten the coffers of our leading weapons makers.

Notice anything new? This pro-war propaganda piece is different because it honestly reveals who bought and paid for it, and who really calls the shots in Politico’s newsroom.

Right on top of this scare piece about Ukraine are the words, “Presented by Lockheed Martin.”

It couldn’t be clearer. Don’t you wish for the same refreshing honesty from all the other media that suckle at the military industrial teat and regurgitate their corporate press releases as if they were genuine independent news reporting?

Since late March, Lockheed had been listed as a sponsor of Politico’s daily national security newsletter—a popular read among Washington’s foreign policy elite. In August, a Lockheed-sponsored article appeared below two advertisements for the F-35 jet that it manufactures.

The most recent Ukraine piece–which was curiously taken down on Tuesday after Tucker Carlson discussed the article on Fox News–quoted from a senior House Republican staffer who said: “We’re staring down an Afghanistan-in-Europe type of event with thousands dead, refugee floodgates opened, and U.S.-credibility gutted. It’s going to be horrible to watch.”

Horrible for everyone but Lockheed which is a co-producer, with Raytheon, of the Javelin anti-tank missile that the U.S. began supplying to Ukraine beginning in 2018.

Ukraine’s government bought 210 of the missiles and 37 Javelin Command launch units at that time, and then another 150 missiles and 10 launch units in 2020.[1]

Image
Javelin anti-tank missile. [Source: lockheedmartin.com]

In October, the Biden administration sent an additional 30 Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine as tensions with Russia intensified, with more sales likely to be forthcoming.

Image
[Source: rferl.com]

In a July poll, 50 percent of Americans said they would support “the use of U.S. troops if Russia were to invade the rest of Ukraine,” up from 30 percent in 2014. This indicates that the kind of reporting being advanced by Lockheed in Politico is having an impact–even if it is distorted.

The Truth Does Not Matter

Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach, the head of the German navy, said that talk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine was “nonsense” and that Russia was merely seeking “respect” for its security concerns in Europe.[2]

Image
Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach [Source: wikipedia.org]

The U.S. has indeed been provoking Russia for years: Since 2015, the CIA has secretly trained elite Ukrainian Special Forces units in firearms, camouflage techniques, land navigation, tactics like “cover and move,” and intelligence; and the U.S. has given $2.4 billion in “security assistance” since backing a 2014 anti-Russian coup—$450 million in 2021 alone.[3]

Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov gleefully tweeted about a planeload of arms arriving from the U.S. on January 23rd, the second of the weekend. He said: “The second bird in Kyiv! More than 80 tons of weapons to strengthen Ukraine’s defense capabilities from our friends in the USA! And this is not the end.”

Image
Another planeload of arms. [Source: twitter.com]

None of this was reported in Politico.

When asked about the Lockheed articles, a Politico spokesman responded: “There is a strong firewall between POLITICO’s newsroom and its business teams. As such, POLITICO’s sales team has no influence whatsoever on editorial content and does not share advertiser information with reporters and editors. Decisions about when ad placements appear as part of a sponsorship are fully at the discretion of the advertiser.” The insinuation was that the articles presented by Lockheed were ads although they appeared to the reader to be actual news articles.

Return on its Investment
During the 2020 election cycle, Lockheed provided the Biden campaign with $447,047 (compared to $517,471 to Donald Trump).

It received a major return on its investment when Biden signed off on a 5 percent increase on Trump’s defense budget in December, vowing to spend $768.2 billion next year.

In 2021, Lockheed reported net sales of $67 billion, and its earnings are already up this year.

In June, Lockheed announced that it was prepared to offer Ukraine the F-16 Viper aircraft, which would be in high demand if war with Russia breaks out.

Image
[Source: defence-blog.com]

The Finnish Air Force announced last month that it will buy 64 F-35A stealth fighters produced by Lockheed to replace its aging Boeing F/A-18 Hornets amidst rising regional tensions.

Image
Lockheed F-35 stealth fighter. [Source: flightglobal.com]

In November, Lockheed concluded a deal to sell 12 S-70 Black Hawk helicopters to Romania.

A picture containing transport, aircraft, helicopter

Image
Lockheed S-70 Black Hawk helicopter. [Source: business-review.eu]

It has also done brisk business in Poland—another country on the front lines of the new Cold War—having signed a deal in 2017 to sell it a high-mobility artillery rocket system, guided launch rocket systems, army tactical missile systems and related equipment for $250 million.

Aggressive Lobbying Strategy

Lockheed’s sponsorship of articles in Politico fits an aggressive lobbying strategy going back decades.

During the mid-1990s, the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO was co-founded by Lockheed’s Bruce Jackson, Vice President for Strategy and Planning, who also founded the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which pushed for the 2003 U.S. invasion.[4]

Now the focal point of Lockheed’s lobbying efforts and fear-mongering is Russia and Ukraine—the topic of a number of articles it has presented in Politico.

One piece in early January was titled “Inside Biden’s secretive weapons shipment to Ukraine.”

It framed secret U.S. arms shipments to Ukraine as necessary in saving Ukraine from peril—the official Biden administration line.

The co-author of the piece, Alex Ward—who also co-wrote the most recent piece warning of a Russian invasion—had been an associate director in the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security. The Atlantic Council, or “NATO’s de facto think tank,” is financed by Lockheed to the tune of $100,000-$249,999 per year.

Image
Alex Ward [Source: pulitzercenter.org]

Well after all Money=Speech=Freedom here in Bizzaroland.

In the fall, Lockheed had “presented” a series of articles in Politico, co-written by Ward, that were critical of Biden’s mishandling of the pullout from Afghanistan.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/0 ... -the-open/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 04, 2022 3:24 pm

The Vast Anti-Russian Psyop Campaign That’s Brought Us to the Brink of Nuclear War
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 28, 2022
Rainer Shea

There’s an absurdity to humanity’s current predicament of standing on the brink of World War III. This is that the decisive factor behind why the U.S. and Russia are close to war has not been the geopolitical struggles, the economic competition, or the imperialist military encirclement around Russia, but the strange and insipid tools that the imperialists have used to bring these factors to the present point. Their sabotage of the international balance wouldn’t have been possible without the paranoid, conspiratorial, and consequently goofy propaganda campaigns that Washington has carried out throughout the last decade’s new cold war.

To make sense of the present tensions, we need to delve into these wild stories, why they’ve been so influential, and where they’re leading us.

Neocons give rise to a special American obsession with conquering Russia

The historical precedent for today’s anti-Russian psychological operations is initially obvious: Cold War anti-communism. The notions about the Reds infiltrating Hollywood, aiming to invade the United States, and being analogous to movie monsters like The Blob established Russians as the enemy. More importantly, these paranoid mass persuasion campaigns got Americans to abandon any sense of self-awareness; it should be self-evidently ridiculous to uncritically accept that Americans are under threat from some all-encompassing foreign enemy, especially since Americans are the ones who are constantly meddling in the affairs of other countries. The manipulative nature of the propaganda is too transparent. But the Cold War’s ideology of aggressive nationalism negated this potential for self-reflection, letting Americans be sure in their embrace of an absurd worldview.

Anti-communism was integral to these manipulations. Yet when it’s come to Russia, the jingoism and xenophobia have persisted beyond when the country stopped being socialist. As Eric Zuesse has observed:

Though the billionaires succeeded, during the first Cold War — the one that was nominally against communism — at fooling the public to think they were aiming ultimately to conquer communism, George Herbert Walker Bush made clear, on the night of 24 February 1990, privately to the leaders of the U.S. aristocracy’s foreign allies, that the actual goal was world-conquest, and so the Cold War would now secretly continue on the U.S. side, even after ending on the U.S.S.R. side. When GHW Bush did that, the heritage of U.S. Senator Jackson became no longer the formerly claimed one, of ‘anti-communism’, but was, clearly now and henceforth, anti-Russian. And that’s what it is today — not only in the Democratic Party, and not only in the Republican Party, and not only in the United States, but throughout the entire U.S. alliance.

And this is what we are seeing today, in all of the U.S.-and-allied propaganda-media. America is always ‘the injured party’ against ‘the aggressors’; and, so, one after another, such as in Iraq, and in Libya, and in Syria, and in Iran, and in Yemen, and in China, all allies (or even merely friends) of Russia are ‘the aggressors’ and are ‘dictatorships’ and are ‘threats to America’, and only the U.S. side represents ‘democracy’.

Now Americans apply the same attitude from the Cold War to any given modern country that’s disobedient towards the empire—whether north Korea, China, Iran, or the current primary propaganda target Russia. The typical sentiments towards these countries share a pathological focus on portraying them as the villains of the world—as aggressors, human rights abusers, enemies of “democracy,” and generally untrustworthy. It doesn’t matter how little substance is attached to these perceptions. They’re not meant to be carefully considered analyses, they’re meant to be cultural mantras, as essential to the U.S. empire’s mythology as the 4th of July or Thanksgiving.

This is at least the general, cruder version of the worldview that the neocons have instilled within the U.S. population. It stems from a more coherent, strategically focused set of teachings which became solidified within the Washington orthodoxy in reaction to U.S. imperialism’s decline. Even prior to 9/11, and to the subsequent collapse of U.S. hegemony, the neocon thought leaders were making the case for their military adventurist agenda by warning of a coming slide in Washington’s influence. The neocon Project for the New American Century’s 2000 statement on “rebuilding America’s defenses,” which is infamous for its suggestion that an attack on U.S. soil would help rally support for greater military spending, concludes that “even a global Pax Americana will not preserve itself. Paradoxically, as American power and influence are at their apogee, American military forces limp toward exhaustion, unable to meet the demands of their many and varied missions, including preparing for tomorrow’s battlefield.”

Since then, as the U.S. has reached the same point of rapid onset collapse as all previous empires—ironically set off by the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions that the neocons pushed through—their cult of Russophobia has proportionately grown. The issues with U.S. military logistics and control that the Project identifies have been blamed on international scapegoats, primarily the Russians and the Chinese. American Russophobia has been modified to go deeper than anti-communism, though associating Putin with a hammer and sickle is a favorite tactic for today’s liberals. The neocons have gotten those within the NATO propaganda bubble to direct their fear and hostility in tandem with the geopolitical aims the empire has for Eurasia, namely: imperialist coups in Russia and Kazakhstan, and the subduing of China. Paranoia about Marxism taking over has evolved into a simple fear of the other, not necessarily dependent on the economic ideology of this other. What matters is that Russia threatens imperial control.

This persistence of xenophobic militarism, irrespective of socioeconomic ideology, reflects the effectiveness with which the left has been brought into the new cold war’s mentality.

War hysteria, racism, & McCarthyism on all ends of the U.S. political spectrum

To be technically accurate, the U.S. left didn’t need to be brought over to the new cold war, because neoconservatism originated within the U.S. left itself. The founding members of the neoconservative movement were originally part of the Cold War era’s Trotskyist faction. Ideologies don’t appear out of nowhere, they evolve out of previous tendencies. And for neoconservatism, the parent tendency was the intensely sectarian, virulently anti-Soviet faction of “Marxists” who naturally found a significant foothold in the Cold War era’s “left” intelligentsia. Christopher Hitchens, whose hyperbolic anti-Sovietism from a Trotskyist perspective led to him defending the Iraq invasion, is one example of this infamous “trot to neocon” pipeline.

Today’s versions of Hitchens bash Russia, China, Cuba, Iran, Chavista Venezuela, Lukashenko’s Belarus, Assad’s Syria, the DPRK, and every other anti-imperialist country under the pretense of wanting to be “principled” in their critiques of “authoritarianism.” “Democratic socialist” groups like Jacobin and the DSA have gone so far as to facilitate platforms which vilify U.S. regime change targets like Nicaragua and Cuba with the purpose of carrying out U.S.-led regime change within these countries. In this environment, there’s no room for an authentic anti-imperialist movement. Even explicitly fascist U.S.-backed movements around the globe, like Ukraine’s Euromaidan and the recent ultra-nationalist terrorist insurgency in Kazakhstan, get the tacic approval of the primary “leftist” figures. So imperialist fearmongering can thrive unchecked across the whole U.S. ideological spectrum.

So was apparent when it was the liberals, many of whom had formerly been anti-war, that led the new campaign to demonize Russia following the 2016 election. Integral to their embrace of militarism and xenophobia was a partisan-motivated trust in intelligence agencies, which led to the figures within these agencies proliferating the worst kinds of reactionary garbage; during the “Russiagate” hysteria, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper claimed that Slavs are genetically specialized towards lying and cheating.

This and the other angles of attack that liberals utilized during Russiagate’s first years, from homophobic depictions of Trump with Putin to demagogic imagery of Red Square replacing White House to unhinged statements about the U.S. having been “invaded,” solidified the neocon orthodoxy among Democrats—to the point where the Democratic Party was rehabilitating the image of George W. Bush, portraying him as representing a nostalgic era. It was this utilization of the U.S. empire’s two-party oligopoly that perfectly carried through the foreign policy goals of the neocons. With Trump’s opposition continuously denouncing him as a Russian agent, he became willing to go even further in antagonizing Russia than Obama had. He expanded sanctions on Russia, armed Ukraine’s belligerently anti-Russian fascist regime, approved expanding NATO into Montenegro, struck Syria multiple times to the effect of inflaming tensions with Russia, and sabotaged U.S.-Russia nuclear arms agreements.

The consequence was the cultivation of nuclear tensions more dangerous than they had been during the most frightening moments of the previous cold war. Atomic scientists have assessed the conditions of the last several years to be as such; since 2018’s second big Syria strike and subsequent nuclear treaty dissolution, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have judged humanity to be increasingly close to “midnight”—the point where the species could become extinct. The scientists assessed that in 2018 we were two minutes to midnight in their “doomsday clock,” in 2019 they said we were again two minutes close, and in both 2020 and 2021 they said that we were 100 seconds close. That their 100 seconds assessment was unprecedented prior to 2020 speaks to just how dire of a situation the U.S. empire has created. And when the scientists soon come out with their 2022 clock update, it wouldn’t be surprising if the number gets even lower.

This is the insanity of the Russophobic and Sinophobic ideology that the neocons have fully inculcated liberals with. Even when a president was willing to bring humanity closer than ever to nuclear war to be “tough on Russia,” liberals continued to declare that that president was suspiciously lenient. A war zealousness this strong naturally carried through into how liberals, and the “respectable” Republican elites who they came to proudly align with during the Trump era, viewed anti-imperialists.

Anti-war, pro-worker, and social justice movements were targeted with censorship as part of the social media crackdown that the Democrats pressured the tech companies to carry out. Jill Stein, Julian Assange, and other figures were decried as Russian assets. Political rhetoric was debased by attacking every challenge to the CIA/CNN narratives as the work of Russian propaganda. This paranoia—born out of uncritical acceptance of the flawed reports intelligence agencies put forth in 2016 which “proved” that Wikileaks got the DNC emails from “Russian hackers”—intensified again around the 2020 election. The intelligence agencies preemptively claimed that Russia, China, and Iran were influencing the electoral process. When the January 6th attack happened, this narrative precedent was used to rationalize a new wave of censorship against anti-imperialists, with Palestinians in particular having experienced social media crackdowns following the riot.

As the Biden administration consolidated power following January 6th, enacting a counterterrorism program designed to target social movements more so than violent white supremacists, the U.S. was more ready than ever for the current war campaign.

A reaction from an empire in turmoil

There’s no stopping the demented determination of the U.S. empire’s drive towards greater escalations with Russia. Even after Ukraine’s government has come out with the conclusion that Russia won’t invade, and that such an invasion would be too logistically impractical for any rational state to carry out, Washington is intent on enacting further sanctions while adding troops to its existing military presence within Ukraine. The Kiev regime, being the fascist U.S. puppet state that it is, has of course provided narrative wiggle room to justify Washington’s provocations. Kiev claims that Russia instead plans to “destabilize” Ukraine, whatever this means. Combined with the recent vague assertions—sourced from predictably anonymous intelligence figures—that Russia seeks to topple Ukraine’s government, this gives the public throughout the imperialist bloc enough propaganda to keep the war fever going.

This consent manufacturing campaign has been effective enough, judging by how the Biden administration has been comfortable with under-delivering on social spending while further inflating the military budget. Even during a pandemic and a depression, the U.S. ruling class is secure enough in the power of its war propaganda to let militarism’s excesses continue unrestrained. And the media is more eager than ever to sell this war effort. Just like when it uncritically reported the CIA’s Iraq WMD lies, the New York Times has applied zero scrutiny in its report on the anonymous claims of a Russian subversion plot in Ukraine. And during Blinken’s press conference on Ukraine, the assembled journalists have revealed their haste to drive forward a U.S. intervention; one of the questions they asked was “as you keep coming back for more dialogue, more talks with the Russians, they continue to act. They continue to mass troops; they continue to destabilize Ukraine. Economically, it’s facing a number of hardships. Would you acknowledge the harm they have already done just through their aggressive actions, and in turn, why would you not consider sanctions at this point?”

The red flags for a scenario like this, where the empire is close to rushing into world war head on, have been here for at least the last decade. When the U.S. pivoted its “War on Terror” towards “great-power competition”; when it officially legalized covert CIA propaganda being directed towards its own citizens in the 2012 NDAA; when it systematically sabotaged its own tools for diplomacy in favor of adventurist military maneuvers; when its military intelligenstia put out a report declaring that Washington must respond to its geopolitical decline by expanding the justifications for waging war; when it platformed warmongering bigotry within its supposedly enlightened and progressive media outlets; it’s all led up to this point.

That lifting of the previous cold war’s ban on domestic psyops enabled an unprecedented fusion between the media and the intelligence centers, to the point of there having emerged a revolving door for former spooks within the corporate news networks. In this environment, of course the press conferences have journalists egging on the government to go to war; the CIA and the media are now one and the same. And in the Pentagon’s 2017 report about how to handle imperial decline, the doctrine behind this wild enthusiasm for war was laid down. The report recommends that Washington embrace a more nakedly imperialist foreign policy than ever:

While as a rule, U.S. leaders of both political parties have consistently committed to the maintenance of U.S. military superiority over all potential state rivals, the post-primacy reality demands a wider and more flexible military force that can generate ad­vantage and options across the broadest possible range of military demands. To U.S. political leadership, maintenance of military advantage preserves maximum freedom of action… Finally, it allows U.S. decision-makers the opportunity to dictate or hold significant sway over outcomes in international disputes in the shadow of significant U.S. military capability and the implied promise of unac­ceptable consequences in the event that capability is unleashed.

Now that Washington’s coup attempt in Kazakhstan has failed, the empire is applying this plan for desperate, scorched-earth destruction. If even Ukraine doesn’t expect Russia to invade, Washington and its most loyal satellite states aren’t sending in troops out of genuine concern over “Russian aggression.” They’re reacting to the fact that Kazakhstan, which is one of the most important countries for Washington to gain as an ally in the new cold war, will remain aligned with Russia and China. Kiev is leading the charge in demonizing Russia for assisting Kazakhstan’s government in defending from the terrorists that Washington just sent into Kazakhstan; Ukraine has prohibited calling Russia’s forces within Kazakhstan “peacekeepers,” pushing the classification of them as “interventionists.” So Washington is now leveraging Ukraine’s status as the Eurasian epicenter for Russophobic zealotry by pivoting NATO involvement into eastern Europe.

The imperialists have stated, and now manifested, their strategy for trying to retain control amid Washington’s geopolitical decline: accelerate military buildup and adopt an unprecedentedly trigger-happy foreign policy. It’s why Biden has further increased the military budget, even as the society within the U.S. empire’s borders crumbles under severe social neglect. The imperialists are throwing everything into this war effort. And the only thing that can compensate for the internal contradictions they’ve fostered is a massive, fanatical campaign of hatred and lies.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/01/ ... clear-war/

Unlike Mr Shea I do not think that these current events are a run up to WWIII. Bluff and economic pressure will not lead to war, these are preliminary to the longer game. The entirely symbolic deployment of a few thousand US light troops(paratroopers) to nearby countries is almost irrelevant to an 'invasion' of Ukraine. The lack of enthusiasm in Germany and France for a new 'Eastern Front' pretty much make any NATO(see: Delian League) military actions pathetic and very unlikely. And even the Ukrainian Defense Minister has stated that Russia does not have nearly enough troops on the front to conquer an area and army the size of Ukraine (by standard rule of thumb you need at least a 2:1 numerical advantage to attempt serious offensive action).

Maybe the Ukes will make an impossible to ignore incursion into the Donbass republics(unlike their desultory but continuous mortaring and reconnaissance probing) or they will initiate a false flag operation to draw Russia into some sort of offensive action either of which will be the excuse the US wants in order to tighten the screws economically and politically. Until I hear of at least a couple of US armor/mechanized divisions on boats in the Atlantic I ain't getting excited about a major land war in Europe.

The thing I like about this piece is the recognition of the long term effects of propaganda. In recent decades some of us found some humor in the over the top to hysterical claims of the Cold War, McCarthyism and Red Scare propaganda. It ain't funny no more as we see it coming back to life, but it is not so much the government/media efforts in this regard, which is pretty much expected, but the way so many have responded to it like Pavlov's dogs which is notable. Weeds lying fallow for decades have found a new lease on life as even US Congressmen spout nonsense about 'communist' Russia despite it's government being capitalist and doing all in it's power to erase the successes of socialism. No amount of talk will change these minds, this is the real 'brainwashing'.

That liberals and the phony left take up this resurrection with enthusiasm is no surprise, as anyone conversant with the history of the Democratic Party and social democrats in general knows. These people are no real friends of the working class and should be shunned and defenestrated.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 05, 2022 2:17 pm

US Again Tries To Pass Off Government Assertions As Evidence

Image

The western media are blaring headlines today about a “revelation” by the US government which does not actually reveal anything because it contains nothing but empty narrative fluff.

“U.S. reveals Russian plot to use fake video as pretense for Ukraine invasion,” reads a headline from CBS News.

“US reveals Russia may plan to create fake pretext for Ukraine invasion,” claims another from The Hill.

The claim is that the Russian government is plotting to fabricate a false flag operation using a graphic video with crisis actors in order to manufacture a pretense for a full-scale military invasion. State Department Spokesman Ned Price and AP reporter Matt Lee had an exchange about this claim at a Thursday press conference that you simply must watch if you haven’t already.


Lee pointed out that claims about false flags and crisis actors were “getting into Alex Jones territory” and asked for the evidence for these extraordinary claims, which one would think is reasonable since extraordinary claims are generally considered to require extraordinary evidence. Price said that the evidence is “intelligence information that we have declassified,” and when Lee asked where the declassified information was Price looked at him like he just asked the stupidest question in the world and said “I just delivered it.”

The exchange goes on to reveal that Price really did mean that the completely unverified government assertion he’d just regurgitated is the evidence for the claim being made, meaning the evidence of the government assertion is that assertion itself.

Refusing to relent, Lee kept hammering the point that a completely unsubstantiated assertion is not the same as evidence especially given all the government assertions that have proved not to be true over the years.

“Matt, you said yourself you’ve been in this business for quite a long time,” Price replied. “You know that when we make information, intelligence information public, we do so in a way that protects sensitive sources and methods.”

Ahh, so the evidence is secret. It’s top secret evidence, to protect “sensitive sources and methods”. It sure is convenient how all the evidence of immensely consequential claims made by a government with an extensive history of lying is always far too sensitive for the public to be permitted to scrutinize.

This is the kind of evidence you can’t see. The evidence is invisible.


“You also know that we do so, we declassify information only when we’re confident in that information,” Price continued. “If you doubt the credibility of the U.S. government, of the British government of other governments and wanna, you know, find solace in information that the Russians are putting out, that’s for you do to.”

So if you doubt the credibility of governments with a very well-documented history of lying about exactly this sort of thing, you’re at best a useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and at worst a Kremlin operative yourself.

Yep, sounds legit. That’s definitely the sort of thing government officials say when they feel like they’re being truthful.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted about the exchange, “This is wild. The State Department’s spokesman can’t comprehend why the Associated Press feels the need to distinguish between a claim and a fact, and becomes visibly offended—and then angered—by the suggestion that his claims may require evidence to be accepted as credible.”

Wild indeed. Assertions are not evidence. A government declassifying itself making an unsubstantiated assertion is not “declassifying” anything. This is not the sort of behavior anyone would accept from anyone else, except perhaps a televangelist or a cult leader, but it’s already being treated as truth by US and British politicians.

If I got on here for example and began drumming up publicity with claims that I have evidence that extraterrestrials are visiting this planet, and then after racking up millions of views and lots of publicity my evidence turned out to be a video clip of me saying “Extraterrestrials have been visiting this planet,” I would be called a liar, a scammer, and a clickbait grifter, and rightly so. I could then claim that I can’t provide any further evidence beyond my own assertion without compromising my sensitive sources and methods, but I’d still quite rightly be called a liar, a scammer, and a clickbait grifter.

But if I’m the most powerful institution in the world and have an extensive history of lying about exactly the sort of claim I just made, that’s considered fine and normal within the mainstream western orthodoxy.

Wild. Just wild.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/02/04 ... -evidence/

Bolding added

Note that some 'news' agencies picked up and ran with these allegations without blinking. You'll never hear that exchange on NPR, cognitive dissonance is to be avoided in your target audience, bad for ratings.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Feb 09, 2022 2:45 pm

PATRICK LAWRENCE: Propaganda and Evidence
February 7, 2022

The wall of propaganda that towers over us, resting on an insidious culture of irrationality that has come to suffuse the American polity, is weakening.

Image
Press Secretary Jen Psaki. (Official White House Photo/ Erin Scott)

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News


Finally. Finally our mainstream press and broadcasters show signs of waking up to the cynical, pervasive, propaganda campaign official Washington wages to obscure its imperial pursuits. Finally there is some suggestion—not more—that the mainstream may someday stop participating in the antidemocratic onslaught of lies and subterfuge they have very willingly assisted in inflicting upon us for most of this century.

I refer to two remarkable confrontations between the press and official government spokespeople this past week. At the State Department last Thursday Matt Lee, diplomatic correspondent of The Associated Press ran department spokesman Ned Price straight to the ground on one of the government’s most familiar, most nonsensical tropes: We told you, and telling you is evidence that what we told you is true.

Aboard Air Force One, National Public Radio correspondent Ayesha Rascoe reacted similarly when Jen Psaki, the president’s press secretary, tried on the same ruse in the matter of civilian casualties during the raid Thursday on the Syrian hideout of Abu Ibrahim al–Hashimi al–Qurayshi, the putative head of the Islamic State. What? Do you dare not believe me? the rarely-to-be-believed Psaki asked aggressively.

At last.

Independent media such as Consortium News have waged a battle against the government’s incessant assertions of facts-that-are-not-facts at least since the WMD in Iraq subterfuge and the irruption of the Russiagate fiasco in mid–2016. Last week the leading U.S. wire service and public broadcaster effectively joined in when they questioned official accounts of two key events in the absence of authentic evidence of their veracity.

Let us not read too much into these developments. The AP and NPR have been card-carrying purveyors of liberal authoritarian orthodoxies for a very long time. Demanding evidence to support official assertions of authority on two occasions is hardly an indication of some new determination to reclaim surrendered ground as independent poles of power.

The Significance

But we ought not miss the potential significance of this turn, either. The wall of propaganda that towers over us, resting on an insidious culture of irrationality that has come to suffuse the American polity, is weakening. In my read, the doggedness of independent media has forced the mainstream to begin reckoning with its own complicities.

I have long admired Matt Lee as a standout among American correspondents. He is one of the most dedicated journalists now active in the Washington press corps, unswerving in his adherence to the principles and ethics of the profession even as most of those around him have abandoned both. His conduct during one of Ned Price’s daily press briefings last week was remarkable even by Lee’s high standards.

Price, a former C.I.A. analyst and a professed propagandist in the Obama White House, announced that Russia was preparing a faked video, with “crisis actors,” of a sabotage incident in eastern Ukraine that would justify a Russian invasion. “What we know, Matt, is that they have engaged in this activity,” Price said as Lee began what became a five-minute and six-second drilling in. “We have information that Russia has already prepositioned operatives to conduct a false-flag operation in eastern Ukraine.”

“Crisis actors?” Lee responded. “Really? This is, like, Alex Jones territory. What evidence do you have to support the idea that there is some propaganda film in the making?”

“This is derived from intelligence information that we have declassified,” Price replied.

Lee: “Where is this information?

Price: “It is intelligence information that we have declassified.”

Lee: “Well, where is it? Where is the declassified information?”

Price (feigning incredulity): “I just delivered it.”

And there you have it: We have evidence of a Russian false-flag operation, derived from declassified intelligence, and I have shared this declassified evidence with you by telling you we have it.

Simultaneously on the presidential jet, Psaki was fielding questions as to who was responsible for 13 civilian casualties, including children, during the raid that ended with al–Qurayshi’s death. The official position is that the ISIS leader detonated a bomb, taking his life and 13 others to avoid capture, and that the Special Forces commandoes conducting the raid bore no responsibility for the casualties.

NPR’s Rascoe, greatly to her credit, thereupon suggested that critics might be skeptical of the Pentagon’s (and President Joe Biden’s) account. “The U.S. has not always been straightforward about what happens with civilians,” Rascoe pointed out. “And, I mean, that is a fact.”

The combative Psaki, having no evidence to support the official rendering of events, instantly went on the offensive. “Skeptical of the U.S. military’s assessment when they went and took out… the leader of ISIS?” She asked, pretending to disbelief just as Price did. “That they are not providing accurate information, and ISIS is providing accurate information?”

In neither case did the official posturing hold. Price took a battering at Lee’s hands the like of which I have rarely seen in a press briefing, live or videoed. Rascoe was more merciful, but Psaki came off just as much the shyster.

‘With Us or Against Us’

Not to be missed in all this is the binary logic Price and Psaki tried to put over in the course of their defenses. Psaki implied that Rascoe, because she did not accept the American account of events in Syria, accepted an ISIS account—this even as there is no ISIS account to accept or reject. In the same line, here is Price later in his exchange with Matt Lee:

“If you doubt the credibility of the U.S. government, of the British government, of other governments, and want to, you know, find solace in information that the Russians are putting out—that is, that is for you to do.”

Preposterous times two. This is no better—no different, indeed—than the George W. Bush administration’s assertion after the September 11, 2001, tragedies: “You’re either with us or with the terrorists,” one of our stupider presidents infamously declared.

Among the notable features of these two exchanges is how surprised the two official spokespeople appeared to be when asked to support their assertions with evidence. And why should they have been otherwise?

The mainstream press and broadcasters, along with “progressive” publications such as Mother Jones and The Nation, have eagerly embraced official accounts of events, while accepting these accounts as evidence in themselves. This is what I mean by a pervasive culture of irrationality.

The Ukraine and Syria crises, the treatment of Uighurs in China, what is or is not going on in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, Moscow’s supposed interventions in American politics: All of these questions and numerous others are an absolute blur—a mess of mis– and disinformation—if you rely on mainstream accounts alone. Were it not for the more conscientious independent publications, there would be no true record of these matters.

I trace this most immediately to the swoon into propaganda and deception that began with the Russiagate fiasco and the liberal authoritarians’ obsessive-compulsive hatred of Donald Trump. Anything that reflected badly on Trump and demonized Russia was fit to print. This seems clear, but we have to go further back to understand what led us to the dire circumstances we now face.

The press’s eager enlistment in Bush II’s “war on terror” was the seminal turn. The events of September 2001 had the American empire on its back foot for just the second time in its century of history, (the first was after defeat in Vietnam) and mainstream media rushed to its defense. After she was canned (deservedly) as executive editor of The New York Times, Jill Abramson gave a remarkably candid account of the corporate-owned press’s entry into servitude.

So it has been ever since. The media’s corruptly close proximity to the power they report upon cannot be separated from the phenomenon of an empire that is in decline and, what is more, knows it.

Are Matt Lee and Ayesha Rascoe exceptions that promise a new way forward, a break in the tight post–2001 embrace of power and the press? Or are they exceptions that prove the enduring rule?

This is not easily answered.

The evidence game, as I’ll call it, took an especially dramatic turn in January 2017, when “the intelligence community” issued a Swiss cheese “assessment” of the mid–2016 theft of the Democratic Party’s mail and the press accepted this devoid-of-evidence assessment as prima facie evidence. Six years later we find ourselves in an information culture that has been rendered indifferent to evidence: It is desired conclusions that matter.

Still ‘Imminent’

Image
NPR headquarters in Washington. (Cornellrockey04/WikimediaCommons)

As I wrote this column Sunday, NPR came over the kitchen radio with yet more unsubstantiated junk about Ukraine—this time quoting National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan saying (once again) that a Russian invasion was “imminent.” The AP news feed ran the headline, “Top Biden aide says Ukraine invasion could come ‘any day.’”

Neither NPR nor The AP cited any evidence to back up Sullivan’s assertion for the simple reason that he didn’t provide any. Plus ça change.

But I tend to think Lee and Ayesha effectively declared the evidence game over last week, when they said, Let’s have some, please. Lee’s byline wasn’t on The AP’s story, it’s worth noting, and Rascoe’s not on NPR’s.

Is this some grand turn in mainstream media’s stance toward power, a dusting off of the old notion of the press as the Fourth Estate? No, I see nothing so precipitous or dramatic. My intent is to suggest the beginning of a long, gradual process, wherein we may find the press shifting away from its supine fealty to power in all its manifestations.

This will depend on two things:

One, there are indications that some voices within the political and policy elites in Washington are turning against America’s imperial adventures—not out of decency or some elevated vision of how the U.S. should act, but because they are coming to cost more than they are worth. This factor must not be underestimated.

This process first became evident with the series of stories The New York Times published late last year in which it exposed the Pentagon’s sloppy conduct and just-as-sloppy deceptions. I am thinking of the exposé last autumn of the fatal drone strike in Afghanistan and subsequent reports of rogue attacks on a Syrian village and a Syrian dam across the Euphrates.

Those reports, while surprising, were not cause to assume the Times had taken some brave turn toward speak-truth-to-power journalism, as some readers interpreted them. They reflected a faction within the policy cliques that thinks these excesses do not serve the cause of American primacy well. The Times appears to line up with this faction.

Two and more interestingly, the persistence of independent media in making true accounts of events ever more available to the reading and viewing public will, a story at a time, require their corporate-owned counterparts to report more honestly. The consistently good reporting on Afghanistan and Syria to be found in independent media reports is a case in point.

We will have to see how all this turns out in coming weeks and months. Lee has been at it a long time and requires no prompt from anyone to do good work. But what he and Rascoe did last week, fair to say, is what reporters and correspondents unbeholden to power have dedicated themselves to since independent media came into their own over the past couple of decades.

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/02/07/p ... -evidence/

Methinks Mr Lawrence's celebration of a 'return to real journalism' is premature as I suspect the miscreants will be severely disciplined in the job market. But a tear-down of the lying liberals at NPR is always a good thing.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 12, 2022 2:48 pm

Image

They Don’t Just Lie to Us About Wars. They Lie to Us About Everything
February 11, 2022
By Caitlin Johnstone – Feb 10, 2022

Propaganda isn’t just about manufacturing consent for wars and ridiculous governmental measures we’d never normally accept. That’s what most people think of when they hear that word, but there’s so very, very much more to it than that.

The lion’s share of propaganda goes not toward convincing us to accept new agendas of the powerful, but toward keeping us entranced in the status quo dream world which enables the powerful to have power in the first place. Toward normalizing status quo systems and training us to shape ourselves to fit into them like neat little cogs in a well-oiled machine.

And it’s not even a grand, monolithic conspiracy in most cases. The giant corporations who indoctrinate us with their advertisements, their Hollywood movies and shows, their apps, their websites and their news media are all naturally incentivized to point us further and further into delusion by the fact that they benefit from the status quo systems which have elevated them to wealth.

So day in and day out we are presented with media which train us what to value, where to place our interest and attention, what success looks like, and how a normal human behaves on this planet. And it always aligns perfectly with the interests of the rich and powerful.

They don’t just teach us what to believe. They teach us who we are. They give us the frameworks upon which we cast our ambitions and evaluate our success, and we build psychological identities out of those constructs. I am a businessman. I am unemployed. My life is about making money. My life is about disappointing people. I am a success. I am a failure. They invent the test of our adequacy, and they invent the system by which we are graded on that test.

These artificial constructs take up such vast portions of our personal psychology that people will live their entire lives completely enslaved to them, making them their entire focus. This enslavement is so pervasive that people will often even take their own lives based on what those made-up constructs tell them about who they are and what they’re worth.

And it’s all a lie. A dream world, made entirely of narrative, constructed by the powerful for the benefit of the powerful. Things as intimate as the thoughts in our heads and the movement of our interest and attention are controlled and dominated with iron-fisted force, all for the benefit of some stupid made-up games about imaginary money and fictional authority.

So most of us sleepwalk through life chasing make believe goals and fleeing artificially constructed demons. Too preoccupied with the illusion to look up and notice the thunderous majesty of life as it really is, and usually too confused to truly perceive it even on those rare occasions when we snap out of the trance for a moment to make an effort.

Untangling yourself from this dream world isn’t easy. It takes time. It takes work. It takes a deep, sustained curiosity about what’s really going on underneath all the muddled mental chatter, about what life truly is underneath all the stories we’ve been told about what life is, about who we truly are underneath all the stories we’ve been told about who we are.

The difference between what we’ve been told and what we find over the course of this investigation is the difference between dream and waking life. The real world is as different from the status quo narrative about the world as it is from any other work of fiction. The two things really could not be any more different.

And the good news is that just as your false view of yourself and your world shaped your human expression in the service of the powerful, the rolling back of that mind fog shapes your human expression into something else entirely. Something grounded in reality. Something authentic. Something primal. Something that exists not for the benefit of some faceless oligarchic empire, but for the same reason the grass grows and the galaxies spin in the cosmos.

And that’s what humanity looks like on the other side of this awkward transition phase that our species is going through at this adolescent point in its development. Free from illusion. In harmony with the real. Enslaved to nobody. Striding clear-eyed into the mystery of what’s to come.

https://orinocotribune.com/they-dont-ju ... verything/

They lies about everything that is important to the Bosses and their rule. There must be some truth else the lies become too obvious. And so the 'human interests' stories might be true, and the sports page better be true because that will be found out in a heartbeat. But war and peace, the degradation of our lives and environment in the service of capital, the selling of stuff, that's all lies.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 19, 2022 2:27 pm

A little refresher on our lying media and government.
Where’s the Evidence of Genocide of Kosovar Albanians?
BY ALEXANDER COCKBURN
OCT. 29, 1999 12 AM PT

So, is there serious evidence of a Serbian campaign of genocide in Kosovo? It’s an important issue because the NATO powers, fortified by a chorus from the liberal intelligentsia, flourished the charge of genocide as justification for bombing that destroyed much of Serbia’s economy and killed about 2,000 civilians.

Whatever horrors they may have been planning, the Serbs were not engaged in genocidal activities in Kosovo before the bombing began. They were fighting a separatist movement, led by the Kosovo Liberation Army, and behaving with the brutality typical of security forces. One common estimate of the number of Kosovar Albanians killed in the year before the bombing is 2,500. With NATO’s bombing came the flights and expulsions and charges that the Serbs were accelerating a genocidal plan; in some accounts, as many as 100,000 were already dead. An alternative assessment was that NATO’s bombing was largely to blame for the expulsions and killings.

After the war was over, on June 25, President Clinton told a White House news conference that tens of thousands of people had been killed in Kosovo on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s orders. A week before came the statement from Geoff Hoon of the British Foreign Office that, according to reports, mostly from refugees, it appeared that about 10,000 Kosovar Albanians had been killed in more than 100 massacres.

Of course, the U.S. and British governments had an obvious motive in painting as horrifying a picture as possible of what the Serbs had been up to, since the bombing had come under increasingly fierce attack, with rifts in the NATO alliance.

The NATO powers had plenty of reasons to rush charges of genocide into the headlines. For one thing, it was becoming embarrassingly clear that the bombing had inflicted no significant damage on the Serbian army. All the more reason, therefore, to propose that the Serbs, civilians as well as soldiers, were collectively guilty of genocide and thus deserved everything they got.

Teams of forensic investigators from 15 nations, including a detachment from the FBI, have been at work since June and have examined about 150 of 400 sites of alleged mass murder.

There’s still immense uncertainty, but at this point it’s plain that there are not enough bodies to warrant the claim that the Serbs had a program of extermination. The FBI team has made two trips to Kosovo and investigated 30 sites containing nearly 200 bodies.

In early October, the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported what the Spanish forensic team had found in its appointed zone in northern Kosovo. The U.N. figures, said Perez Pujol, director of the Instituto Anatomico Forense de Cartagena, began with 44,000 dead, dropped to 22,000 and now stand at 11,000. He and his fellows were prepared to perform at least 2,000 autopsies in their zone. So far, they’ve found 187 corpses.

A colleague of Pujol, Juan Lopez Palafox, told El Pais that he had the impression that the Serbs had given families the option of leaving. If they refused or came back, they were killed. Like any murder of civilians, these were war crimes, just as any mass grave, whatever the number of bodies, indicates a massacre. But genocide?

One persistent story held that 700 Kosovars had been dumped in the Trepca lead and zinc mines. On Oct. 12, Kelly Moore, a spokeswoman for the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, announced that the investigators had found absolutely nothing. There was a mass grave allegedly containing 350 bodies in Ljubenic that turned out to hold seven. In Pusto Selo, villagers said 106 had been killed by the Serbs, and NATO rushed out satellite photos of mass graves. Nothing to buttress that charge has yet been found. Another 82 Kosovars allegedly were killed in Kraljan. No bodies have been turned up.

Although surely by now investigators would have been pointed to all probable sites, it’s conceivable that thousands of Kosovar corpses await discovery. As matters stand, though, the number of bodies turned up by the tribunal’s teams is in the hundreds, not thousands, which tends to confirm the view of those who hold that NATO bombing provoked a wave of Serbian killings and expulsions, but that there was and is no hard evidence of a genocidal program.

Count another victory for the Big Lie. Meanwhile, the normally reliable Society for Endangered People in Germany says 90,000 Gypsies have been forced to flee since the Serbs left Kosovo, with the KLA conducting ethnic cleansing on a grand scale. But who cares about Gypsies?

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm ... story.html

************************************************************

FEB. 26, 2002 / 12:38 PM
Propaganda: Remember the Kuwaiti babies?
By LOU MARANO

WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 (UPI) -- If you liked the lie about the murder of Kuwaiti babies after Iraq's invasion of the oil-rich emirate in 1990, you'll love the Office of Strategic Information.

That is, if the Pentagon's new office of shadow plays survives in the form it had been envisioned.

Last week The New York Times reported that the Defense Department is paying the Rendon Group, a Washington-based international consulting firm, $100,000 per month to help the OSI with a broad campaign that would include "black" propaganda, or disinformation -- commonly known as lies.

This brought to mind one of the most notorious pieces of disinformation promulgated the last time the government wanted to build public support for a war against Iraq. It was fabricated by Hill and Knowlton, one of the world's largest public relations firms. This is the story that in 1990 invading Iraqi soldiers pulled Kuwaiti premature babies from their incubators and left them to die on the cold floor.

The Bush administration has scrambled away from the storm of criticism sparked by the Times' report, and the president promised Monday that his government would not lie about defense policy. On Sunday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on NBC's "Meet the Press": "The person in charge is debating whether it should even exist in its current form, given all the misinformation and adverse publicity it has received."

The OSI was created shortly after Sept. 11 to build public support abroad for the U.S. war on terrorism.

On Wednesday, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith told reporters that the Pentagon would never lie to the public. But United Press International's Pentagon correspondent Pamela Hess wrote that Feith "refused to rule out the possibility that hired guns -- private lobbying or public relations firms with more legal latitude -- would spread misinformation on the Pentagon's behalf."

On Monday a spokeswoman in the Office of the Secretary of Defense said Feith's words had been misconstrued.

"I don't think he said that we might hire 'hired guns,'" said Army Lt. Col. Catherine Abbot. "I think that's a misinterpretation of what he said."

But the transcript of the Feb. 20 Defense Writers' Group breakfast meeting supports Hess' interpretation. Feith was asked twice if he had ruled out the possibility of contractors spreading disinformation, and he evaded the question both times.

The Rendon Group said it would not lie.

Spokeswoman Jeanne Sklarz declined to discuss the nature of Rendon's contract with the Pentagon. "Let me just say that we have a confidentiality/nondisclosure agreement in place" with the Department of Defense. "We don't speak about the work we do for clients," she told UPI.

"The only thing I can say is that we have not, do not, and will not engage in disinformation."

According to The New York Times, "the Rendon Group has done extensive work for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Kuwaiti royal family and the Iraqi National Congress, the opposition group seeking to oust President Saddam Hussein. ... The firm is well known for running propaganda campaigns in Arab countries, including one denouncing atrocities by Iraq during its 1990 invasion of Kuwait."

Reminded of Hill and Knowlton's incubator story -- which echoed World War I Allied propaganda that invading German soldiers had bayoneted and mutilated Belgian babies in 1914 -- Sklarz said: "We would not do that. ... (President) John Rendon really believes that you don't need anything other than the truth to deliver messages."

UPI asked Hill and Knowlton if it now acknowledges the incubator story as a deception. "The company has nothing to say on this matter," media liaison Suzanne Laurita replied. When asked if such a deception would be considered part of the public relations business, she answered: "Please know again that this falls into the realm that the agency has no wish to confirm, deny or comment on."

The Iraqi invaders were guilty of enough acts of gratuitous cruelty, as numerous eyewitnesses reported, that one wonders why inventing an atrocity was considered necessary.

Hill and Knowlton did not produce the deception under a federal contract, but rather on behalf of the oil-rich Kuwaiti government. An appearance of U.S. government validation, however, came from a hearing of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on Oct. 10, 1990.

In his 1992 book "Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War," Harpers magazine publisher John R. MacArthur wrote that the caucus is not a committee of Congress, before which it would be a crime to lie under oath. "Lying from under the cover of anonymity to a caucus is merely public relations."

The 15-year-old star witness was indeed anonymous, identified only by her first name of Nayirah. "According to the caucus, Nayirah's full name was being kept confidential to prevent Iraqi reprisals against her family in occupied Kuwait," MacArthur wrote.

In fact, she was a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, and her father -- ambassador to the United States Saud Nasir al-Sabah -- sat listening in the hearing room. Sobbing, Nayirah described how she, as a volunteer at al-Addan Hospital in Kuwait City, had seen Iraqi soldiers remove 312 babies from their incubators and leave them to die on the floor.

On Jan. 12, 1991, the U.S. Senate approved support of the war against Iraq by a narrow, five-vote margin. Did the story about the murdered babies make the critical difference?

By the time the deception was exposed, America was basking in the euphoria of the quick Gulf War victory. No one seems very indignant to have been taken in.

Let's hope we don't get any "stories" like this from contractors working for the Office of Strategic Information.

https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2002/02/26 ... 014745117/
Oh, but you see, they're not lying this time.....
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 21, 2022 2:29 pm

"The more things change...."

kcatfish
Nov 28, 2014

“You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”

Image
Newspaper Depiction Of The USS Maine Exploding In Havana Harbor

Frederic Remington, the famous artist who brought to life American images of the west was hired by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst to illustrate the revolution erupting in Cuba. He wrote back to Hearst one day in January 1897:

“Everything is quiet. There is no trouble. There will be no war. I wish to return.”
Hearst sent back a note: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”


When the USS Maine exploded in a harbor in Cuba on the 25th of January 1898, Hearst’s newspapers soon ran a story entitled: “The War Ship Maine was Split in Two by an Enemy’s Secret Infernal Machine”. This was, of course, the Weapons of Mass Destruction of its day. The notion that Spain would sink an American warship unprovoked was itself specious. So the claim that the Spanish destroyed the USS Maine with an explosive device was a bald-faced lie, concocted by Newspaper magnates intended primarily to serve two purposes. The first purpose was to sell newspapers. The first thing that slipped beneath the waves in this battle was the truth. A salacious lie, a fact free presumption, innuendo and dog whistle journalism was leashed upon a trusting public, all wrapped in slick newspapers, and a newborn sense of national entitlement. The story was wildly successful to media magnates everywhere. The US was the new kid on the block; like an adolescent, hormones skeining through our bloodstream, what we could take we probably should take. Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst and Isaac Temple of the New York Journal were midwifing another Manifest Destiny. Why should the United States accept the presence of the Spanish Navy in the Caribbean waters near our own coast? Gosh we sure could use the resources for a growing nation when this moribund empire and its shaky naval vessel can hardly maintain combat patrols around the Caribbean. Weren’t these poor Cuban peasants under the thumb of the Spanish oppressors just like the American Revolutionaries who only two generations previously fought and died to shed the colonies of the clutches of the Royal Crown? The first attempts to go after Cuba actually began before the American Civil War. A short period of isolationism set in after the bloody war ended and the country licked its wounds. It wasn’t long before the Expansionists began another narrative of the old empire, lurking in our territorial waters, profiting on the suffering of people who were mostly portrayed by newspapers as small black children in need of supervision and guidance, not a proud and indigenous population.

Just the talk of empire sold newspapers.

On the other side was the outrage. There was an entire political party engaged just to oppose the purloining of land because it happens to be within our sphere of influence. George S. Boutwell was the president of the Anti-Imperialism League, a band of people who argued that this was the most important question of the day. In fact, the Anti-Imperialist League made the case that the US Constitution compelled us to gain “the consent of the governed” before establishing rule anywhere as it is written in the Constitution. The Constitution built a republic, argued the Anti-Imperialists, not an empire.

The evil genius of Hearst and Pulitzer was that they rendered the Spanish occupiers as implacable and brutish overlords. They could, at will, paint the Spanish occupiers with any color they wished and no amount of oversight or warning could stop the campaign or balance it out with reasonable counters. Did the Spanish mistreat the Cubans? Well, not overtly. But facts were no reason to present a true depiction of circumstances. A few strokes with paint brush and before you know it there are ditches filled with Cuban peasants who only wanted to keep their own lands or defend the purity of their daughters.

The model for Yellow Journalism was templated in the Spanish American War. A media magnate decides to sell a war, and discovers how lucrative it can be. The media magnate discovers his innate power to affect the path of the world and like an addict, continues to prevaricate and manipulate.

It must be heady.

Hearst. Ailes. Pulitzer. Limbaugh. The names are different, but they represent almost the exact same institutions. The New York Times was not exactly Fox News, or Clear Channel because the Times still covered important news and in other stories the Times did their due diligence in regards to responsible journalism. Then again this was not unlike the New York Times in the lead up to the war in Iraq. Judith Miller lied and the paper of record supplied the smoking gun. But mostly the rest of the paper maintained a high level of function.

As if to double down on the falsehood, the Hearst newspapers published technical diagrams of the secret Spanish torpedoes they used to sink the US ship. And was this any different than Colin Powell, who later disavowed his claims claiming he was mislead, who sat in front of Congress and told us with certainty about the chemical weapons and the yellowcake shipments? With his pluck and charisma, he confidently convinced a nation that Saddam had WMDs and could or would distribute them to our enemies. Just like the New York Times in 1898, he had diagrams, very impressive ones. But yes, this was different. These two events were about 100 years apart, plenty of time for the implications and the build up to go down the memory hole. In both cases, the casus beli had been recapitulated so many times and in so many forms that it took on its own truth and those in power felt powerless to turn the machine off. If it’s any consolation to General Powell, Captain Sigsbee of the Maine also came to believe in the torpedo theory that he first pooh-poohed. Yes, the right wing propagandists had us all bamboozled, then and now. Today the discomfiture comes upon the realization that the Internet didn’t save us. The promise of digital technology was still trumped by our atavistic reflexes so deftly played by conservatives, that when one squawks “we’re under attack” loud enough, eventually everyone ducks and covers.

In the run up to hostilities between Spain and the United States the public was divided. Expansionists wanted to attack Spain immediately while there were voices of moderation that wanted confirmation that the stories were true. Of course this was the same with Iraq II. There were the Center For A New American Progress dutifully repeating the narratives scripted by new organizations and think tanks. On the left was MoveOn and Code Pink and a nascent and tenuous Air America.

In both cases, the liars, backed by the media, skilled purveyors of rot, won out.

Films of Spanish occupiers shooting Cuban insurgents to death turned out to be reenactments filmed in New Jersey. Woops. Well you see it was just to give the audience a flavor of the action. It’s as if our own involvement in the perfidy becomes invisible to us. Thumping war drums in 2002, Fox News couldn’t say enough about Saddam being a threat to the world as he gassed his own people. Of course, they didn’t say a thing about Alcolac International and Phillips, US raw chemical manufacturers actually provided Saddam’s government with thiodiglycol, the precursors to nerve agents used at Hallabja. That little bit of dissonant information was left out. Pictures of the dead bodies at Hallabja were aired on Fox every hour on the hour before during and after the invasion. And when the invasion turned into an occupation/insurgency/civil war, the Hallabja pictures were posted even more often to remind us why we entered into this debacle.

Propaganda, in its rawest form was in full swing 1899, as it was after 9/11. In that 1899, Clemencia Arango, a Cuban woman, was held and questioned by Spanish authorities on the New York bound passenger vessel Olivette. It didn’t take long before Hearst and Pulitzer spinning the story and crafting the headlines:

[i/“Spanish Officials On Board American Vessels“, and “Refined Young Women Stripped and Searched by Brutal Spaniards While Under Our Flag on the Ollivette”.[/i]

Were we going to allow a young woman to be brutalized by the imperial occupiers of her homeland? Would we allow this on a US vessel? This more than just an affront to American authority. It was an affront to manliness.

Victor Lawson’s two Chicago newspapers sold the war from the other end of the argument. Spain was an empire in decrepitude and this island meant something for our economy. An invasion and replevin of Cuba would serve everyone, especially the oppressed masses.
Sounds a lot like Saddam’s brutal dictatorship.

The poor American citizen.

We all trust so acutely our journalists, even at the worst possible times.

In 1910, the Maine was raised in Havana Harbor and made a symbol of American might. Bodies were removed from the wreckage and the ship towed to deeper waters and sunk officially in a ceremony in front of the USS Birmingham, and the USS North Carolina. In 1974, Admiral Hyman Rickover examined the ship evidence again and determined that a fire in the coal-bunker sank the ship, not the Spanish.

Oh, and there were no weapons of mass destruction.

sources: wiki

https://medium.com/covilian-military-in ... de6c0e1210

One often hears progressives bemoaning 'America's' 'loss of innocence' Just when the hell was that? Might want to check with Native Americans... Or take a look at the events that led up to the US war on Mexico, some sordid stuff. Rich white men been lying dogs since Day One.
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