by Ron West
Among the multiplying fables and fake news eagerly disseminated by U.S. corporate media is the claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered the alleged hacking of U.S. Democrats. Sources within U.S. intelligence agencies are cited. Why anyone would believe anything out of a U.S. spook’s mouth is a mystery. The major U.S. media are so heavily infiltrated with spies, they are totally discredited, too.
U.S. Corporate Media: Liar, Liar, with Pants on Fire
by Ron West
This article previously appeared on the author’s web site.
“The CIA expects intelligence officers to teach others to lie, deceive, steal, launder money, and perform a variety of other activities that would certainly be illegal if practiced in the United States.”
Business Insider parrots Associated Press who parrots NBC:
“The NBC report said that the evidence is “nearly incontrovertible””
Further it had been asserted:
“...that the intelligence comes from “diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies.”
It didn’t identify the countries involved or how they might have such sensitive information from Putin’s inner sanctum.
And those third party spies would be from NATO’s three Chihuahuas? The CIA’s favorite Kiev Nazis? Any nation with leadership subject to CIA blackmail or Russophobe (Poland would be a suspect) intelligence service willing to launder faked intelligence for the CIA? That would be the most likely source of CIA “intelligence” reporting “hacked information” attributed to Putin that most likely was leaked (and almost certainly wasn’t hacked.) So, the CIA has handed the very, very lame (but still dangerous) duck Obama “nearly incontrovertible” evidence … “nearly” meaning in Orwellian dialect the “classified” evidence Putin hacked (the already leaked information) can be refuted, but shouldn’t be, because the CIA says it’s so:
“Professional standards require intelligence professionals to lie, hide information, or use covert tactics to protect their “cover,” access, sources, and responsibilities. The Central Intelligence Agency expects, teaches, encourages, and controls these tactics so that the lies are consistent and supported (“backstopped”). The CIA expects intelligence officers to teach others to lie, deceive, steal, launder money, and perform a variety of other activities that would certainly be illegal if practiced in the United States. They call these tactics “tradecraft,” and intelligence officers practice them in all the world’s intelligence services” -- Hulnick & Mattausch, “Ethics and Morality in U.S. Secret Intelligence”
Skills employed in the CIA’s relationships with journalists, do you suppose?
Forked Tongue Professionals
“…the [Central Intelligence] Agency has a whole stable of writers, its favorite magazines and newspapers, its publishing houses, and its “backgrounders” ready to go at all times” – former Pentagon liaison to the CIA Colonel L Fletcher Prouty
Let’s jump back three or so years and examine a case where the professional media whores servicing the CIA were actually busted in their lies but this was (why shouldn’t you be surprised) never reported by those same media street-walkers covering the beat. Remember Obama accusing Assad of gassing his own people with sarin nerve agent at Ghouta, Syria, in 2013?
“We do not believe that, given the delivery systems, using rockets, that the opposition could have carried out these attacks. We have concluded that the Syrian government in fact carried these out” -- Barack Obama
“The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media” — former CIA Director William Colby
Yeah, that plays, CNN doesn’t have to worry it will be called out on repeating Obama’s lie to PBS because The New Yorker dropped Seymour Hersh who had to move to the (unknown to Americans) London Review of Books to accomplish reporting:
“…more than ten members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested in southern Turkey with what local police told the press were two kilograms of sarin. In a 130-page indictment the group was accused of attempting to purchase fuses, piping for the construction of mortars, and chemical precursors for sarin…”
And we certainly don’t have to worry about NATO member Turkey letting the cat out of the bag it was a NATO nation’s intelligence agency that facilitated the sarin attack blamed on Assad because our ally in the ‘war on terror’ shut down the newspaper that dared report the facts:
“Wiretapped phone conversations reveal the process of procuring the gas at specific addresses as well as the process of procuring the rockets that would fire the capsules containing the toxic gas. However, despite such solid evidence there has been no arrest in the case. Thirteen individuals were arrested during the first stage of the investigation but were later released, refuting government claims that it is fighting terrorism”
Where is the western media on this story? Where is ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post and ‘friends’? Oh, that’s right, they get the facts exactly backwards because:
“You could get a [Washington Post] journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month.” -- CIA operative cited in “Katherine The Great” by Deborah Davis
It took a Washington Post blacklisted “fake news” website to blow this next whistle on the CIA:
“Dr. Ulfkotte says the corruption of journalists and major news outlets by the CIA is routine, accepted, and widespread in the western media, and that journalists who do not comply either cannot get jobs at any news organization, or find their careers cut short”
“There is quite an incredible spread of relationships. You don’t need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are [Central Intelligence] Agency people at the management level.” -- William B. Bader, former CIA intelligence officer
Yeah, and it would seem at the LA Times too:
“Email exchanges between Ken Dilanian and public relations officers at the agency were discovered after the Intercept sent a FOIA request to the CIA over its relationship with reporters. In many of the emails, Dilanian promised to provide the agency with positive coverage, often going so far as to change entire drafts of articles based on the CIA’s replies”
“During the 1976 investigation of the CIA by the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church, the dimensions of the Agency’s involvement with the press became apparent to several members of the panel, as well as to two or three investigators on the staff. But top officials of the CIA, including former directors William Colby and George Bush, persuaded the committee to restrict its inquiry into the matter and to deliberately misrepresent the actual scope of the activities in its final report”
“Contrary to the notion that the CIA insidiously infiltrated the journalistic community, there is ample evidence that America’s leading publishers and news executives allowed themselves and their organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services”
“The Agency’s relationship with [The New York] Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. [It was] general Times policy … to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible.”
Preceding quotes from CIA and the Media by Carl Bernstein.
“You don’t need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are [Central Intelligence] Agency people at the management level.”
What has changed? Not much it would seem when it requires a CIA veteran, Melvin Goodman, to blow the whistle on the Washington Post performing fellatio on the CIA at (SURPRISE!) Truthout.org, a Washington Post blacklisted “fake news”site:
“David Ignatius, The Washington Post’s self-appointed apologist for the Central Intelligence Agency, has struck again. Last year, Ignatius argued that it was “just plain nuts” to investigate the CIA’s assassination program because “nobody had been killed”
“Propaganda experts in the CIA station in Kinshasa busily planted articles in the Kinshasa newspapers, Elimo and Salongo. These were recopied into agency cables and sent on to European, Asian, and South American stations, where they were secretly passed to recruited journalists representing major news services who saw to it that many were replayed in the world press. Similarly, the Lusaka station placed a steady flow of stories in Zambian newspapers and then relayed them to major European newspapers
“During a staff meeting I voiced my concern to —-, were we on safe ground, paying agents to propagandize the New York press? The agency had recently been warned against running operations inside the United States and propagandizing the American public. —- seemed unconcerned. We were safe enough, he said, as long as we could plausibly claim that our intent was to propagandize foreigners at the United Nations
“The task force worked out the details by cabling New York, Lusaka, Kinshasa, and key European stations. Each delegation opened a bank account in Europe to which European-based CIA finance officers could make regular deposits. Thereafter the CIA could plausibly deny that it had funded anyone’s propagandists in the United States. It would be extremely difficult for any investigators to prove differently
“Director Colby testified before the House Select Committee on Intelligence, saying: “We have taken particular caution to ensure that our operations are focused abroad and not at the United States to influence the opinion of the American people about things from the CIA point of view.” A remarkable statement in view of what we had been doing in the task force (footnoted: Director Colby received copies of all [relevant] cables and memoranda.)”
Preceding quotes from In Search of Enemies by dissident CIA officer John Stockton.
Back to the Russian “Hack” BS
As is typical with CIA propaganda on hot button issues, and it is more than likely when tasked idiots at Langley are in frenetic meetings, there are multiple stories that seem to be made up on the go.:
“The gist of the Case Against Russia goes like this: The person or people who infiltrated the DNC’s email system and the account of John Podesta left behind clues of varying technical specificity indicating they have some connection to Russia, or at least speak Russian. Guccifer 2.0, the entity that originally distributed hacked materials from the Democratic party, is a deeply suspicious figure who has made statements and decisions that indicate some Russian connection. The website DCLeaks, which began publishing a great number of DNC emails, has some apparent ties to Guccifer and possibly Russia. And then there’s WikiLeaks, which after a long, sad slide into paranoia, conspiracy theorizing, and general internet toxicity has made no attempt to mask its affection for Vladimir Putin and its crazed contempt for Hillary Clinton. (Julian Assange has been stuck indoors for a very, very long time.) If you look at all of this and sort of squint, it looks quite strong indeed, an insurmountable heap of circumstantial evidence too great in volume to dismiss as just circumstantial or mere coincidence”
Pretending for a moment there had been a hack, and assuming a Russian speaker involved, if this were not a false lead planted by a hacker, a Russian speaker pointing to Russia as “nearly incontrovertible” evidence is ludicrous. Thirty percent of Ukraine’s population speaks Russian as their first language, most of the rest speak Russian as their second language. Over 30 percent of Latvians speak Russian at home. Russian is spoken by significant portions of the populace throughout the central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. Russian is the first language of 70 percent of Belarus’ populace. Millions speak Russian exterior to Russia. What a piece of crap for evidence. Any intelligence agency in the world could be behind the purported hack (if there had been a hack), particularly Poland, Latvia and Ukraine, with an ax to grind with Putin. And if it had been Russian intelligence directing a hack, they’d certainly not have been so sloppy.
“The greatest likelihood is, we’re witnessing an inside turf war.”
What’s more is, if the CIA hasn’t cleaned up its act since CIA officer John Stockwell had penned his exposé In Search of Enemies, and certainly the CIA has not, it could as easily be the CIA itself had manufactured and laundered “evidence” of a so-called “hack” through a third party precisely for purposes of information operation aimed at a clique in the USA national security apparatus they’re contesting. This could be a Clinton aligned CIA going after Trump aligned national security professionals. In my estimation, the greatest likelihood is, we’re witnessing an inside turf war play out in “mainstream” media the CIA has/had a cozy relationship with for a very long time:
“PAO (Public Affairs Office) now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly and television network in the nation. This has helped us turn some “intelligence failure” stories into “intelligence success” stories, and it has contributed to the accuracy [canned laugh here] of countless others. In many instances, we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests or jeopardized sources and methods” -- Robert Gates, CIA internal memo (1991)
Disclaimer: This article should not be construed to attribute to the author a preference of Trump over Clinton. In my estimation, both camps are equal opportunist criminals.
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