Hypocrisy
Behind the Russian-Election Frenzy
December
13, 2016 Antiwar,com
By Robert Parry
As Democrats, the Obama administration and some neocon Republicans slide
deeper into conspiracy theories about how Russia somehow handed the presidency
to Donald Trump, they are behaving as they accused Trump of planning to behave
if he had lost, questioning the legitimacy of the electoral process and sowing
doubts about American democracy.
The thinking then was that if Trump had lost, he would have cited
suspicions of voter fraud – possibly claiming that illegal Mexican immigrants
had snuck into the polls to tip the election to Hillary Clinton – and Trump was
widely condemned for even discussing the possibility of challenging the
election’s outcome.
His refusal to commit to accepting the results was front-page news for
days with leading editorialists declaring that his failure to announce that he
would abide by the outcome disqualified him from the presidency.
But now the defeated Democrats and some anti-Trump neoconservatives in
the Republican Party are jumping up and down about how Russia supposedly
tainted the election by revealing information about the Democrats and the
Clinton campaign.
Though there appears to be no hard evidence that the Russians did any
such thing, the Obama administration’s CIA has thrown its weight behind the
suspicions, basing its conclusions on “circumstantial evidence,” according to a report in
The New York Times.
The Times reported: “The C.I.A.’s conclusion does not appear to be the
product of specific new intelligence obtained since the election, several
American officials, including some who had read the agency’s briefing, said on
Sunday. Rather, it was an analysis of what many believe is overwhelming
circumstantial evidence — evidence that others feel does not support firm
judgments — that the Russians put a thumb on the scale for Mr. Trump, and got
their desired outcome.”
In other words, the CIA apparently lacks direct reporting from a source
inside the Kremlin or an electronic intercept in which Russian President
Vladimir Putin or another senior official orders Russian operatives to tilt the
U.S. election in favor of Trump.
More ‘Group Thinking’?
The
absence of such hard evidence opens the door to what is called “confirmation
bias” or analytical “group think” in which the CIA’s institutional animosity
toward Russia and Trump could influence how analysts read otherwise innocent
developments.
For instance, Russian news agencies RT or Sputnik reported
critically at times about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, a complaint that
has been raised repeatedly in U.S. press accounts arguing that Russia
interfered in the U.S. election. But that charge assumes two things: that
Clinton did not deserve critical coverage and that Americans – in any
significant numbers – watch Russian networks.
Similarly,
the yet-unproven charge that Russia organized the hacking of Democratic
National Committee emails and the private email account of Clinton’s campaign
chairman John Podesta assumes that the Russian government was responsible and
that it then selectively leaked the material to WikiLeaks while withholding
damaging information from hacked Republican accounts.
Here the
suspicions also seem to extend far beyond what the CIA actually knows. First,
the Republican National Committee denies that its email accounts were hacked,
and even if they were hacked, there’s no evidence that they contained any
information that was particularly newsworthy. Nor is there any evidence that –
if the GOP accounts were hacked – they were hacked by the same group that
hacked the Democratic Party emails, i.e., that the two hacks were part of the
same operation.
That
suspicion assumes a tightly controlled operation at the highest levels of the
Russian government, but the CIA – with its intensive electronic surveillance of
the Russian government and human sources inside the Kremlin – appears to lack
any evidence of such a top-down operation.
Second,
WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange directly
denies that he
received the Democratic leaked emails from the Russian government and one of
his associates, former British Ambassador Craig Murray, told the U.K. Guardian
that he knows who “leaked” the Democratic emails and that there never was a
“hack,” i.e. an outside electronic penetration of an email account.
Murray said,
“I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and
it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.”
‘Real News’
But even
if Assange did get the data from the Russians, it’s important to remember that
nothing in the material has been identified as false. It all appears to be
truthful and none of it represented an egregious violation of privacy with some
salacious or sensational angle.
The only reason the emails were newsworthy at all was that the
documents revealed information that the DNC and the Clinton campaign were
trying to keep secret from the American voters.
For
instance, some emails confirmed Sen. Bernie Sanders’s suspicions that the DNC
was improperly tilting the nomination race in favor of Clinton. The DNC was
lying when it denied having an institutional thumb on the scales for Clinton.
Thus, even if the Russians did uncover this evidence and did leak it to
WikiLeaks, they would only have been informing the American people about the
DNC’s abuse of the democratic process, something Democratic voters in
particular had a right to know.
And,
regarding Podesta’s emails, their most important revelation related to the
partial transcripts of Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street banks, the
contents of which Clinton had chosen to hide from the American people. So,
again, if the Russians were involved in the leak, they would only have been
giving to the voters information that Clinton should have released on her own.
In other words, these disclosures are clearly not “fake news” – the other
hysteria now sweeping Official Washington.
In the
mainstream news media, there has been a clumsy effort to conflate these
parallel frenzies, the leak of “real news” and the invention of “fake news.”
But investigations of so-called “fake news” have revealed that these operations
were run mostly by young entrepreneurs in places like Macedonia or Georgia who
realized they could make advertising dollars by creating outlandish “click
bait” stories that Trump partisans were particularly eager to read.
According
to a
New York Times investigation into
one of the “fake news” sites, a college student in Tbilisi, Georgia, first
tried to create a pro-Clinton “click bait” Web site but found that a pro-Trump
operation was vastly more lucrative. This and other investigations did not
trace the “fake news” sites back to Russia or any other government.
So,
what’s perhaps most telling about the information that the CIA has accused
Russia of sharing with the American people is that it was all “real news” about
newsworthy topics.
What
Threat to Democracy?
So, how
does giving the American people truthful and relevant information undermine
American democracy, which is the claim that is reverberating throughout the
mainstream media and across Official Washington?
Presumably,
the thinking is that it would have been better for the American people to have
been kept in the dark about these secret maneuverings by the DNC and the
Clinton campaign and, by keeping the public ignorant, that would have ensured
Clinton’s election, the preferred outcome of the major U.S. news media.
There’s
another double standard here. For instance, when a hack of — or a leak from — a
Panamanian law firm exposed the personal finances of thousands of clients,
including political figures in Iceland, Ukraine, Russia and other nations,
there was widespread applause across the Western media for this example of
journalism at its best.
The
applause was deafening despite the fact that at least one of the principal
“news agencies” involved was partly funded by the U.S. government. The
Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a USAID-backed
non-governmental organization, also was earlier involved in efforts to
destabilize and delegitimize the elected Ukrainian government of President
Viktor Yanukovych.
“Corruption”
allegations against Yanukovych – pushed by OCCRP – were integral to the
U.S.-supported effort to organize a violent putsch that drove Yanukovych from
office on Feb. 22, 2014, touching off the Ukrainian civil war and – on a global
scale – the New Cold War with Russia.
Yet, in
the case of the “Panama Papers” or other leaks about “corruption” in
governments targeted by U.S. officials for “regime change,” there are no
frenzied investigations into where the information originated. Regarding the
“Panama Papers,” there was simply back-slapping for the organizations that
invested time and money in analyzing the volumes of material. And there were
cheers when implicated officials were punished or forced to step down.
So, why
are some leaks “good” and others “bad”? Why do we hail the “Panama Papers” or
OCCRP’s “corruption evidence” that damaged Yanukovych – and ask no questions
about where the material came from and how it was selectively used – yet we
condemn the Democratic email leaks and undertake investigations into the source
of the information?
In both
the “Panama Papers” case and the “Democratic Party leaks,” the material
appeared to be real. There was no evidence of disinformation or “black
propaganda.” But, apparently, it’s okay to disrupt the politics of Iceland,
Ukraine, Russia and other countries, but it is called a potential “act of war”
– by neocon Sen.
John McCain, R-Arizona – to reveal evidence of wrongdoing or
excessive secrecy on the part of the Democratic Party in the United States.
Shoe on
the Other Foot
Russian
President Putin, while denying any Russian government attempt to tilt the
election to Trump, recently commented on the American hypocrisy about
interfering in other nations’ elections while complaining about alleged
interference in its own or those of its allies. He described a conversation
with an unnamed Western “colleague.”
Putin
said, “I recently had a conversation with one of my colleagues. We touched upon
our [Russian] alleged influence on some political processes abroad. I told him:
‘And what are you doing? You have been constantly interfering in our political
life.’ And he replied: ‘It’s not us, it’s the NGOs’. I said: ‘Oh? But you pay
them and write instructions for them.’ He said: ‘What kind of instructions?’ I
said: ‘I have been reading them.’”
Whatever
one thinks of Putin, he is not wrong in describing how various U.S.-funded
NGOs, in the name of “democracy promotion,” seek to
undermine governments that have ended up on Official
Washington’s target list.
And
another aspect of the hypocrisy permeating Official Washington’s belligerent
rhetoric directed toward Russia: Aren’t the Democrats doing exactly what they
accused Trump of planning to do if he had lost the Nov. 8 election, i.e.,
question the legitimacy of the results and thus undermine the faith of the
American people in their democratic system?
For days,
Trump’s unwillingness to accept, presumptively, the results of the election
earned him front-page denunciations from many of the same mainstream newspapers
and TV networks that are now trumpeting the unproven claims by the CIA that the
Russians somehow influenced the election’s outcome by presenting some
Democratic hidden facts to the American people.
Yet, this
anti-Russian accusation not only undermines the American people’s faith in the
election’s outcome but also represents a reckless last-ditch gamble to block
Trump’s inauguration – or at least discredit him before he takes office – while
using belligerent rhetoric that could push Russia and the United States closer
to nuclear war.
Wouldn’t
it be a good idea for the CIA to at least have hard evidence before the spy
agency precipitated such a crisis?
Investigative
reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated
Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s
Stolen Narrative, either in print here or
as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
