Inside the Trump Administration's War on UNRWA and Palestinian Refugees
The Trump administration's decision to drastically slash American contributions to the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) has sent shockwaves through the organization and left millions of Palestinian refugees wondering if the basic ingredients for their survival will soon disappear. "This is the worst financial crisis in UNRWA's history," Chris Gunness told the Electronic Intifada's Ali Abunimah.
<p dir="ltr">UNRWA was established in 1950 to care for the 750,000 Palestinians who were driven from their homes and land by the Israeli military two years before. Today, the agency provides free education, healthcare and basic foodstuffs to the five million Palestinians spread across the Middle East who inherited refugee status. In the Gaza Strip, UNRWA is the second largest employer and responsible for providing services to over 70 percent of the population. Indeed, the agency is a lifeline for most residents of the besieged coastal enclave, and its collapse would likely trigger a society wide catastrophe.</p><p dir="ltr">With its bid to defund UNRWA, the Trump administration has broken with decades of American policy. The administration had initially intended to cut off funding to UNRWA altogether, but an intervention by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson secured an American pledge of $60 million for the year — only half of what the US had been obliged to donate.</p><p dir="ltr">A diplomat with knowledge of the Trump administration's discussions about funding UNRWA told me that Tillerson finessed the funding to demonstrate his authority over colleagues he saw as intruding on his turf. The diplomat described presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley as Tillerson's rivals, and as the key forces behind the assault on UNRWA.</p><p dir="ltr">Kushner is a pro-Israel ideologue whose family has donated heavily to illegal Israeli settlements and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/11/us/politics/jared-kushner-israel.html">nurtured a long friendship</a>with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Tasked by the president with achieving the "ultimate deal" between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Kushner has put forward a <a href="http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/trump-ultimate-deal-borders-palestine-state-no-talk-israel-saudi-no%20talks-jerusalem-1510521541">one-sided plan</a> that promises to relegate a Palestinian state to a few cantons in the West Bank and a little neighborhood on the edge of East Jerusalem, consolidating Israel's settlement enterprise while leaving millions of Palestinians legally excluded from their own national project.</p><p dir="ltr">By starving UNRWA, Kushner hopes to force Palestinians to relinquish their refugee status and eliminate the right of return granted to them by UN Resolution 194. He would thereby remove one of the few cards the Palestinians have left to play at the negotiating table. Since he is unable to shatter the agency in a single blow, his strategy is aimed at disruption.</p><p dir="ltr">Haley has joined forces with Kushner to destroy UNRWA, but for other reasons. According to the diplomat, Haley has been fuming since the entire UN General Assembly voted this December to condemn Trump's pledge to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. "We will be taking names," Haley <a href="https://twitter.com/nikkihaley/status/943241599953309696?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fthehill.com%2Fpolicy%2Finternational%2F365686-haley-the-us-will-be-taking-names-after-un-vote-on-jerusalem-decision">warned</a> ahead of the vote, vowing to punish the UN for defying Trump.</p><p dir="ltr">Besides settling her vendetta against virtually the entire world, Haley is exploiting her platform at the UN to curry favor with the pro-Israel oligarchs who could propel her presidential ambitions. Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire Netanyahu confidant who donated $5 million to Trump's inauguration, has been the <a href="https://lobelog.com/nikki-haley-neocon-heartthrob/">second largest donor</a> to Haley's 527 political organization, with a $250,000 donation in 2016. (Last year, Adelson dumped $10 million of his personal fortune into the Israeli-American Council, instantly <a href="https://forward.com/news/386949/breaking-with-scrip-adelson-says-iac-is-a-hardline-aipac-alternative/">transforming</a> the group into a pro-Likud competitor to AIPAC, the main arm of the Israel lobby in Washington.)</p><p dir="ltr">Haley's most influential advisor at the UN is not any foreign policy expert, but a veteran Republican consultant from South Carolina named <a href="https://forward.com/news/national/389760/5-things-to-know-about-nikki-haleys-jewish-right-hand-man-jon-lerner/">Jon Lerner</a>. A former advisor to the neoconservative darling Sen. Marco Rubio, Lerner has identified his mentor as Arthur Finkelstein, the notoriously ruthless Republican operative who advised Netanyahu's 1996 run for prime minister and <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-arthur-finkelstein-unseen-power-broker-1.5270441">helped broker</a> the merger between Netanyahu's Likud Party and Avigdor Lieberman's far-right Yisrael Beiteinu in 2013.</p><p dir="ltr">Haley's pro-Israel messaging appears to reflect Lerner's plan to position her as a presidential contender.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and Defense Secretary James Mattis have been <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-16/u-s-aid-to-palestinians-through-un-cut-by-half-to-60-million">credited in some reports</a> with helping Tillerson secure the compromise on UNRWA funding, but according to the diplomat, they were willing to fight for the funding.</p><p dir="ltr">For his part, Trump has proven rudderless, shifting positions from moment to moment depending on which advisor has his ear. The diplomatic source said the president took Tillerson's side during a lunch in early January, then suddenly pivoted to back Haley after she lobbied him a few days later. Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, have done next to nothing to push back against the attack on UNRWA.</p><p dir="ltr">The defunding of UNRWA would immediately result in the shuttering of 700 schools that provide 525,000 young people with first-rate, secular-oriented educations that emphasize gender equality and human rights. Basic food supplies would dry up for millions in some of the poorest regions of the Middle East. And as recent history has shown, refugee camps can be easily instrumentalized by radical elements from abroad.</p><p dir="ltr">The case of Naher al-Bared, when jihadists infiltrated a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon in 2007 and triggered a brutal invasion by the Lebanese Army that resulted in the camp's complete destruction, should serve as a frightening lesson in how quickly things can fall apart. But within the Trump administration, personal ambitions and pro-Israel ideology have overwhelmed any concern about further destabilizing a region that is already teetering on the brink.</p>
Jill Stein on the Senate Intelligence Committee's Investigation of Her Campaign for Russian Collusion: 'There Is No There There'
This late November, the Senate Intelligence Committee delivered a request for internal communications and documents to Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein. According to former members of Stein's 2016 presidential campaign, the request arrived through intellience commitee chairs Sen's Richard Burr and Mark Warner, who are seeking information for the ongoing Russiagate investigation. While the Senate Intelligence Committee has yet to make the details of its inquiry into Stein's campaign public, Republican Sen. Richard Burr told reporter Emma Loop that he is looking for evidence of Stein's "collusion with the Russians."
<p dir="ltr">In recent weeks, the bipartisan investigation into Russian meddling has strayed from its focus on Trump and begun targeting left-wing political figures. Last month, the House Intelligence Committee <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/grayzone-project/intel-committee-subpoena-randy-credico-russia-investigation" target="_blank">sent a subpoena</a> to Randy Credico, a retired comedian, noted prison reform activist and local New York political gadfly, seeking information on rumors that he had served as a go-between for right-wing operative Roger Stone and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. And now, Senate investigators have trained their sights on Stein, a veteran anti-war activist and pediatrician despised by Hillary Clinton partisans, who blame her for throwing the election to Trump.</p><p dir="ltr">I spoke to Stein immediately after the news from <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/emmaloop/the-senates-russia-investigation-is-now-looking-into-jill">BuzzFeed</a> leaked of the Senate inquiry into her campaign. She characterized the demand for Green Party documents as clear evidence of a "new McCarthyism, which is the flip side of a military madness that is stronger than ever in this country."</p><p dir="ltr">"This is the continuing focus of empire and austerity and the assault on democracy that goes with it," she continued. "The silver lining is we will get a chance at the microphone. A lot of people will be screaming at us but some people will hear us."</p><p dir="ltr">Since news broke of the congressional inquiry into Stein's campaign, she has been a punching bag for hardcore Democrat partisans. Zac Petnacas, the former rapid response director for Hillary Clinton's campaign, <a href="https://twitter.com/Zac_Petkanas/status/942880616357486592" target="_blank">proclaimed</a>, "Jill Stein is a Russian agent" eight times in one tweet until he reached the maximum character limit.</p><p>The origins of allegations against Stein lay in the so-called Steele Dossier, a collection of unverified claims cobbled together by a former MI5 agent named Christopher Steele, who was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/clinton-campaign-dnc-paid-for-research-that-led-to-russia-dossier/2017/10/24/226fabf0-b8e4-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html?utm_term=.6cd36eb68b81" target="_blank">paid by</a> the DNC and the Clinton campaign. According to journalist Howard Blum, Steele <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/how-the-explosive-russian-dossier-was-compiled-christopher-steele" target="_blank">relied on</a> "an army of sources whose loyalty and information he had bought and paid for over the years." Under the watch of James Comey, the FBI also <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fbi-made-deal-ex-spy-trump-dossier-n727061" target="_blank">made a deal</a> to fund the dossier, but the arrangement fell apart, leaving it to the Clinton camp to funnel fees to Steele through the opposition research firm, Fusion GPS.</p><p>In addition to claiming that Putin held compromising footage of sex workers urinating on Trump on camera in a VIP suite at the Moscow Ritz, the dossier <a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3259984/Trump-Intelligence-Allegations.pdf" target="_blank">accused</a> Stein of having been funded by the Russian government to attend a gala hosted by the Russian-backed news network, RT.</p><p>Stein told me this claim is false: "I paid my own way to Moscow. They [the Russian government] did not pay for my hotel or expenses, and I have the receipts to prove it."</p><p><strong>A gala dinner and collusion illusions</strong></p><p>The RT gala was organized in November 2015 as a celebration of the international network's 10th anniversary. Dignitaries, diplomats, politicians, media professionals, and activists from around the world <a href="https://www.rt.com/about-us/press-releases/conference-rt-10-years/" target="_blank">gathered in Moscow for the event</a>. I was among those invited to attend and I accepted. I wanted to interact with colleagues from around the globe and had long considered RT a valuable space in a conformist American media environment that is increasingly hostile to dissenting opinions, particularly where Western foreign policy is concerned.</p><p>During the two-day affair, I participated in a public <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3tLQLsm6iI" target="_blank">panel discussion</a> with former Salt Lake City mayor Rocky Anderson, historian Peter Kuznick and the Christian Science Monitor's Moscow correspondent, Fred Weir, among others. I did not have a chance to collude with any Russian officials, though I did attempt a selfie with Mikhail Gorbachev as he brushed by me in a hallway. As far as I know, the only person who received a fee to attend the RT gala was former Gen. Michael Flynn, who was previously unknown to guests and was referred to dismissively as the "Obama general." Flynn's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RIUE68cpGc" target="_blank">one-on-one</a> with RT host Sophie Shevardzadze went over poorly; he was regarded as inarticulate and uninformed by a range of audience members I spoke to (I did not attend).</p><p>The event culminated with a catered dinner featuring live music and a video mash-up of RT's greatest hits over the years. I spent much of the time at a table chatting with former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura and his family, and Lee Camp, a left-wing political comedian who hosts the popular RT program, "Redacted Tonight." None of us had any inkling that the festivities would come to be seen as a de facto crime scene by packs of Beltway reporters and congressional investigators. It would be months before Flynn emerged as a wild-eyed Trump surrogate and a full year before the Russiagate narrative <a href="https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/862801658132254720?lang=en" target="_blank">was spun out of the ashes</a> of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.</p><p>At a table immediately in front of the stage, Stein was seated beside Willy Wimmer, the former foreign minister of Germany. Also at the table was Czech former Deputy Prime Minister Cyril Svoboda, a Serbian filmmaker named Emir Kusturica and Flynn. Stein said her only substantive conversation was with Wimmer, and it lasted about two minutes. In the middle of the event, Russian President Vladimir Putin strode into the room alongside his chief of staff and spokesman. They briefly seated themselves at the dignitaries' table before Putin appeared on stage for a few remarks, then shuffled toward the exit.</p><p>I asked Stein what took place when Putin arrived at her table. "Putin briefly ran around the table and shook everyone's hand. No names were exchanged, it was an impersonal greeting," she recalled. "There was nothing about that table that facilitated any communication of any sorts. The one person there who spoke English and Russian fluently was sitting next to Michael Flynn and translated what he said was the conversation between Flynn and Putin. It amounted to something to the effect of, 'How are you? I'm fine.'"</p><p>Stein told me she had requested a moment with Putin or Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to discuss US-Russian cooperation on nuclear non-proliferation and de-escalating the conflict in Syria. "Hillary Clinton was promoting a <a href="https://theintercept.com/2016/10/10/in-secret-goldman-sachs-speech-hillary-clinton-admitted-no-fly-zone-would-kill-a-lot-of-syrians/" target="_blank">no-fly zone</a> in Syria, which would have put us in the position of shooting down Russian planes when we have 2,000 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert. So communication with your adversaries was important and we were in a crisis at the time. Our [Green Party] communications were exemplary," she asserted. "They were content-focused, not about quid pro quo or any backroom deals. They were on target and in the words of JFK, I believe we should never negotiate out of fear, and never fear to negotiate."</p><p>In the end, Stein was able to meet only with the foreign affairs chair of the Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament. A <a href="https://www.jill2016.com/stein_in_russia_calls_for_principled_collaboration" target="_blank">statement</a> posted on Stein's campaign website outlined her agenda for the meeting: "a new commitment to collaborative dialogue between our governments to avert disastrous wars for geopolitical domination, destruction of the climate, and cascading injustices that promote violence and terrorism."</p><p>Stein's visit to Moscow was part of a wider itinerary that brought her in contact with like-minded political figures across the Atlantic. She had just visited Paris, where she participated in a conference on climate change and rubbed shoulders with Jeremy Corbyn, now the leader of the UK Labour Party. "Corbyn had pretty much the same stance on the need for a peace offensive in the Middle East, a weapons embargo in the region, the dangers of a no-fly zone in Syria and on the need for nuclear non proliferation," she recalled. "These aren't fringe ideas and most of the world sees them as absolutely critical."</p><p><strong>Picture of a pseudo-scandal</strong></p><p>In the weeks after Hillary Clinton's election loss, a <a href="https://twitter.com/DrJillStein/status/874760306844590080?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.buzzfeed.com%2Femmaloop%2Fthe-senates-russia-investigation-is-now-looking-into-jill" target="_blank">photograph</a> of Stein seated at the table with Putin and Flynn began making the rounds. For many frustrated Democrats, the image was clear evidence of a nefarious conspiracy between a fringe third-party candidate, a Trump aide and Putin to deprive Hillary of her historic destiny. In their minds, Stein was not just a spoiler, but a spy.</p><p>"The fact that they got a photo out of this allowed them to launch a baseless smear campaign," Stein said. "And they distorted the event itself. It was practically a who's who of the peace community on hand."</p><p>In July, Stein's name was <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/343292-jill-stein-looped-into-widening-investigation-of-russia-and-trump-jr" target="_blank">added</a> to a Senate Judiciary Committee letter demanding communications between Donald Trump Jr., Russian officials and members of Trump's presidential campaign. There was no indication that Stein had ever interacted with Trump Jr., and she <a href="https://twitter.com/DrJillStein/status/888463617548529664?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fthehill.com%2Fpolicy%2Fnational-security%2F343292-jill-stein-looped-into-widening-investigation-of-russia-and-trump-jr" target="_blank">denounced</a> the letter as "an obvious smear designed to generate a fake news feeding frenzy."</p><p>So far, no material has turned up to validate the committee's unusual line of inquiry. In the face of the Senate Intelligence Committee's request, Stein pledged cooperation. "We intend to provide any documents that are relevant," she maintained, "but we had very little communications with Russia other than through RT for our appearances and limited logistics around the RT conference."</p><p dir="ltr">But in the frenetic atmosphere of Russiagate, even Stein's interviews with RT America have become grounds for suspicion. An <a href="https://www.rt.com/usa/372890-odni-rt-influenced-election/" target="_blank">error-laden</a> report released by the <a href="https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf" target="_blank">Director of National Intelligence</a> this January cast RT as a key aspect of Kremlin meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Among the transgressions the DNI accused RT of committing was hosting a third-party debate that gave a platform to candidates like Stein. The report also complained that RT was guilty of promoting "radical discontent."</p><p dir="ltr">Despite the storm of accusations, Stein remains confident that her name will eventually be cleared. "Real people are not buying this effort to demonize us and [the investigation has] lost the thread. There is simply no there there," she stated. "But there will be a lot of damage done before it comes out on the other end."</p>
Why the Mere Idea That Neocon Senator Tom Cotton Might Run Trump's CIA Is Terrifying
In a recent profile of Tom Cotton, the Wall Street Journal's Jason Willick characterized the 40-year-old junior Republican senator from Arkansas as "hawkish and realistic" and described his worldview as "tinged with idealism." Yet it was unclear what the unabashedly Strangelovian Cotton did to earn such a charitable description, as he rattled off a series of opinions that amounted to a call for world war without end.
<p dir="ltr">Cotton told Willick he favored arming Japan and South Korea with nuclear weapons to counter North Korea, an unprecedented escalation that would bring the region a stride closer to armageddon. China, according to Cotton, is a "rival in every regard" that must be isolated economically and confronted militarily with aggressive freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea. (The senator ignored a recent <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/09/us-could-potentially-lose-next-war-to-russia-or-china-warns-rand.html">Rand assessment</a> that found the US could easily find itself outmatched in a duel with the Chinese military.) From eastern Europe to Asia to the Middle East, Cotton urged regime change operations to replace governments that resisted Pax Americana with "countries that share our principles." On Iran, Cotton would accept nothing short of war, imagining a cakewalk that would only require "several days" of bombing, as he has <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/08/politics/tom-cotton-bombing-iran-several-days/index.html">previously said</a>.</p><p dir="ltr">Cotton's remarks are especially disturbing in light of rumors of his potential nomination as CIA director. Reports surfaced this November of a coming reshuffle that would move Mike Pompeo, a longtime stooge of the Koch Brothers and evangelical Muslim basher, from CIA to Secretary of State, dislodging the insufficiently loyal Rex Tillerson, who Trump has trashed as "weak on everything." While the Cotton appointment may not happen in the immediate future, he still appears to be next in line to take the helm at Langley in the Trump administration. If the move ever takes place, one of the key hubs of the national security state would fall into the hands of a militant neoconservative whose worldview was formed through prolonged cultivation in a right-wing hothouse.</p><p dir="ltr">Cotton would hardly be the first ideologue to take the helm at Langley. During the 1950s, Allen Dulles used the CIA as a vehicle to recruit a collection of Nazi war criminals and mafia henchmen for covert anti-communist campaigns across Europe, develop the failed mind control program MK ULTRA and plot assassinations and international intrigues in order to topple popular governments. Then there was Bill Casey, who painted the Soviet Union as the puppet master of international terrorism in order to justify secretly funding Central American death squads through the world's most unsavory third parties.</p><p dir="ltr">But Cotton is in a class of his own, not because he is an unbridled zealot, but because he would be the first fully developed product of the neoconservative movement to rise to such a sensitive position. If appointed, he is almost certain to militarize intelligence in the service of the Saudi-Israeli axis and drive their destabilizing anti-Iranian agenda to terrifying extremes. </p><p dir="ltr"><strong>The path to power, from Harvard to Iraq</strong></p><p dir="ltr">Cotton's grooming as a neocon cadre began at Harvard University, where he won a <a href="http://www.claremont.org/page/fellowships/publius-fellowship/publius-fellowship-alumni/">fellowship</a> from the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank in California that fused the anti-gay kulturkampf with libertarian "starve the beast" economics. At the Harvard Crimson, Cotton emerged as a prolific voice of preppy reaction, <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1997/10/3/promises-and-covenants-pmen-are-simple/">promoting</a> divorce-proof "covenant marriages" as a remedy for social decay, upholding political <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1998/2/18/one-cheer-for-apathy-pwalter-rathenau/">apathy as a virtue</a> and activism as a vice, and hailing the valor of professional golfers. "Without great soldiers, we can receive such instruction, for instance, from Justin Leonard, whose sixty-foot putt on the seventeenth hole after two-and-a-half days of poor play sealed the American victory," Cotton wrote in September 1999, <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1999/9/27/editorial-notebook-all-glory-to-the/">likening</a> the Ryder Cup to the Battle of Antietam. </p><p dir="ltr">Cotton's senior thesis at Harvard was an ode to the most elitist, anti-democratic themes contained in the Federalist Papers. "Inflammatory passion and selfish interest characterizes most men, whereas ambition characterizes men who pursue and hold national office," Cotton <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/09/the-making-of-a-conservative-superstar/380307/">wrote</a> of the Founding Fathers. "Such men rise from the people through a process of self-selection since politics is a dirty business that discourages all but the most ambitious."</p><p dir="ltr">His own ambition vaulted him into the ranks of the U.S. Army as it barreled across Iraq and sent the country spiraling into a sectarian bloodbath. From inside armored personnel carriers and behind the barrel of a gun, Cotton experienced his only substantive engagement with the people of the global south. It was clearly a formative period that left him brimming with hostility. "One thing I learned in the Army is that when your opponent is on his knees, you drive him to the ground and choke him out," he <a href="https://www.cfr.org/event/conversation-iran-nuclear-deal-senator-tom-cotton">reflected</a> this October. Though he failed to earn any special distinction on the battlefield, Cotton resorted to opinion writing to earn a bit of fame back home.</p><p dir="ltr">In January 2006, New York Times correspondents Eric Lichtblau and James Risen <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/23/washington/23intel.html">revealed</a> the existence of a warrantless CIA program that examined the financial records of American citizens suspected of terrorist involvement. The story appeared almost simultaneously in several other papers, triggering a public tantrum from Vice President Dick Cheney. From his garrison in Iraq, Cotton saw a perfect opportunity to rally the conservative shock troops back in the States. He fired off an indignant email to the New York Times and cc'ed a right-wing blog, Powerline, for good measure. Citing his credentials as a Harvard Law grad and former law clerk, Cotton demanded Lichtblau, Risen and their editor, Bill Keller, be <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/11/tom-cotton-arkansas-new-york-times/#">jailed</a> under the Espionage Act: "By the time we return home, maybe you will be in your rightful place: not at the Pulitzer announcements, but behind bars," he thundered at the journalists.</p><p dir="ltr">George W. Bush's approval rating was hovering around 30 percent by this point, public support for the war had evaporated and Americans were coming home by the thousands in wheelchairs and coffins. But here was a young platoon leader—a Harvard Law grad, no less—willing to defend the war on terror against the treasonous nabobs of negativism. When Powerline <a href="http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/10/a-fateful-letter-to-the-editor-of-the-times.php">published</a> the letter, Cotton became an instant folk hero among right-wing Iraq war dead-enders. Before he had even returned home to his family's cattle farm in Arkansas, his political career had been made.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>The great neocon hope</strong></p><p dir="ltr">Cotton first entered Congress in 2012 as a representative from the formerly Democratic Arkansas district that contained Bill Clinton's hometown. Iran-bashing became his hobby horse, prompting him to introduce an extreme "<a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/tom-cotton-corruption-of-blood_n_3322251.html">Corruption of Blood" bill</a> that would have forbidden trade with the relatives of Iranian individuals who were under sanctions, from their great-grandchildren to their nieces and uncles. Panned as an outrageous violation of the Constitution, the bill died on the House floor, an embarrassing rebuke to the self-styled constitutional law expert. (Article III of the Constitution forbids punishing the relatives of those convicted of treason, while the Fifth Amendment grants due process even to non-citizens charged with crimes.) </p><p dir="ltr">Cotton struck out the following year on a campaign to unseat incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor. On the stump, he demonstrated all the charisma of a filing cabinet, compensating for his lifeless delivery with incendiary <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/10/07/tom-cotton-terrorists-collaborating-with-mexican-drug-cartels-to-infiltrate-arkansas/?utm_term=.faa8e4abb78c">warnings</a> that a coalition of ISIS terrorists and Mexican drug cartels would overrun the country unless the southern border was sealed off with a Maginot-style wall. Cotton won in a landslide, sailing into the Senate on the strength of surging anti-Obama sentiment and piles of cash from Likudnik oligarchs.</p><p dir="ltr">As Eli Clifton and Jim Lobe <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/10/16/trump-ignores-advisers-iran-deal-follows-money">reported</a>, the second largest source of funding for Cotton's senate campaign was Paul Singer, the pro-Israel venture capitalist who has bankrolled a who's who of neocon outfits in Washington. Cotton also benefited from nearly a million dollars in supportive advertising from the Emergency Committee for Israel, a right-wing group founded by the face of the neocon movement, Bill Kristol. ECI operated for a time out of the offices of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, the group that drummed up support for regime change in Iraq. This office <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/washington-post-conservative-blogger-aligned-with-the-pro-israel-far-right-b70db28bccf9/">also housed</a> Orion Strategies, the lobbying firm that has represented the governments of Taiwan and the Republic of Georgia, two of the key US-backed bulwarks against China and Russia.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>A relentless drive toward war with Iran</strong></p><p dir="ltr">In the Senate, Cotton's obsession with Iran deepened by the day. Within weeks of his swearing-in, he orchestrated an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/03/09/world/middleeast/document-the-letter-senate-republicans-addressed-to-the-leaders-of-iran.html">explosive letter</a> signed by 46 Republican senatorial colleagues and addressed to the "Leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran." Published on Senate letterhead, the missive aimed to convince Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to disregard the power of President Barack Obama to implement the internationally brokered P5+1 nuclear non-proliferation negotiations. The arguably unprecedented stunt led to accusations that Cotton had violated the Logan Act, which forbade diplomatic freebooting.</p><p dir="ltr">While the White House fumed, Cotton tweeted a translated version of his letter to Khamenei, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and President Hassan Rouhani. But in his haste, it appeared Cotton had acted without the help of a native Farsi speaker and simply <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/30/sen-tom-cottons-farsi-version-of-his-explosive-letter-to-iranian-leaders-reads-like-a-middle-schooler-wrote-it/">run the letter through Google translate</a>: "We hope while the nuclear negotiations are progressing this letter enriching your knowledge of our constitutional system and mutual clear understanding elevating," the concluding line read.</p><p dir="ltr">A day after the diplomatic fiasco, Cotton scrambled off to a <a href="https://theintercept.com/2015/03/09/upon-launching-effort-scuttle-iran-deal-senator-tom-cotton-meets-defense-contractors/">private event</a> with the National Defense Industrial Association, the lobbying arm of America's top arms merchants. Cotton's rhetoric on Iran was music to the ears of the weapons industry. "The policy of the United States should be regime change in Iran," he <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/25/trump-iran-foreign-policy-regime-change-239930">declared</a>. "I don't see how anyone can say America can be safe as long as you have in power a theocratic despotism."</p><p dir="ltr">Ironically, the senator hasound a natural ally in Riyadh, the political vortex of theocratic despotism. When Trump inked an unprecedented $150 billion arms deal with Saudi kingdom, Cotton chimed in with his effusive approval. "This arms deal sends the right message to both friend and foe alike," Cotton <a href="https://www.cotton.senate.gov/?p=press_release&amp;id=677">stated</a>, describing it as a step "to maintain peace in the region."</p><p dir="ltr">Cotton has insisted that "there are no mythical moderates" among Iran's leadership. Even worse, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tom-cotton-us-senator-apparently-does-not-know-the-capital-of-iran-10111640.html">according to him</a>, was the fact that the Iranian government was "already in control of Tehran." While Cotton melted down over the Iranian government's presence in its own capital, most Iranians seem to have accepted that the United States was comfortably in control of Washington.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump's open embrace of the Saudi-Israeli axis has elevated Cotton's influence, transforming him into the administration's congressional Iran whisperer. While advising efforts to whittle away at the Iran nuclear deal, he has co-sponsored legislation to make it easier to reimpose sanctions despite Iran's faithful compliance with the agreement. Cotton's presence in the Senate is so central to the neocon agenda that the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes has <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/dont-do-it-why-moving-tom-cotton-to-the-cia-is-a-bad-idea/article/2010794">argued against</a> his promotion to CIA director. But as Cotton made clear in his senior thesis long ago, he views himself as a man of destiny driven to the heights of power by limitless ambition. Before long, the world could become a laboratory for his own "inflammatory passion."</p>
Michael Flynn's Indictment Exposes Trump Team's Collusion With Israel, Not Russia
When Congress authorized Robert Mueller and his team of lawyers to investigate "links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump," opponents of the president sensed that sooner or later, hard evidence of Trump's collusion with the Russian government would emerge.
<p dir="ltr">Seven months later, after three indictments that did little, if anything, to confirm the grand collusion narrative, Mueller had former National Security Council advisor Michael Flynn dragged before a federal court for lying to the FBI. The Russia probe had finally netted a big fish.</p><p dir="ltr">As the details of the Flynn indictment seeped out into the press, however, the bombshell was revealed as another dud. To the dismay of many Trump opponents, nothing in Flynn's rap sheet demonstrated collusion with Russia. Instead, the indictment undermined the Russiagate narrative while implicating another, much more inconvenient foreign power in a plot to meddle in American politics.</p><p dir="ltr">According to plea agreement Flynn signed with Mueller, Flynn admitted to lying to the FBI about a phone call he placed to the Russian ambassador to the US, Sergei Kislyak, during the transition period between the election and inauguration — not during the campaign. Flynn's first order of business with the Russian diplomat was to beseech him not to retaliate for sanctions imposed by Obama on Russia for <a href="https://thebaffler.com/salvos/from-russia-with-panic-levine" target="_blank">still-unproven</a> allegations that Russian intelligence agencies hacked the Democratic National Committee. In other words, Flynn was caught trying to influence Russia, not the other way around.</p><p dir="ltr">The only area where Flynn proposed any form of coordination with Russia was in defeating ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria. The Trump administration's attempts to collaborate with its Russian counterparts in Syria have been the target of relentless sabotage from an opportunistic media and Obama era national security officials who considered the catastrophic semi-covert operation to arm Syrian insurgents a part of their legacy. Thanks to stifling Cold War atmosphere these elements have cultivated in Washington, the US has been reduced to an impotent bystander while Russia, Iran, and Turkey have <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/22/iranian-and-turkish-leaders-arrive-in-russia-for-syria-talks-with-putin" target="_blank">joined together to impose an end</a> to the proxy war that has ravaged Syria for the past five years.</p><p dir="ltr">To be sure, Flynn indictment did contain a stunning revelation of collusion between Team Trump and a foreign state. But it was not the country that the national media has obsessed over for the past year.</p><p dir="ltr">Flynn was found by the FBI to have lobbied Kislyak to exercise Russia's veto against the passage of a United Nations security council resolution condemning the growth of Israel's illegal settlements. And he did so under orders from Jared Kushner, the presidential son-in-law and Middle East fixer, who was himself acting on behalf of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.</p><p dir="ltr">Thanks to Flynn's indictment, we now know that the Israeli prime minister was able to transform the Trump administration into his own personal vehicle for undermining Obama's lone effort to hold Israel accountable at the UN. A clearer example of a foreign power colluding with an American political operation against a sitting president has seldom, if ever, been exposed in such glaring fashion.</p><p><strong>Kushner's deep ties to the Israeli right-wing and ethical breaches</strong></p><p dir="ltr">The day after Kushner was revealed as Flynn's taskmaster, a team of researchers from the Democratic Super PAC American Bridge found that the presidential son-in-law had <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/jared-kushner-disclosure-form-west-bank-settlements-israel-white-house-729290" target="_blank">failed to disclose</a> his role as a co-director of his family's Charles and Seryl Kushner Foundation during the years when his family's charity funded the Israeli enterprise of illegal settlements. The embarrassing omission barely scratched the surface of Kushner's decades long relationship with Israel's Likud-led government.</p><p>During the 1990's, a teenaged Jared Kushner was forced to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/11/us/politics/jared-kushner-israel.html" target="_blank">vacate</a> his own bedroom so Netanyahu had a place to stay when he was in New York City for business. Since at least 2006, the Kushners have <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.757068" target="_blank">donated</a> at least $315,000 to the Friends of the IDF, the American fundraising arm of the Israeli military, and tens of thousands of dollars to illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, from Beit El to Gush Etzion.</p><p dir="ltr">The Kushner family foundation has even donated to the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva, a West Bank-based Jewish religious institution that has served for a base of radical settler terror attacks against Palestinian villagers. The yeshiva has been led by a pair of rabbis who produced a genocidal tract that the Israeli newspaper Maariv <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/story/148016/how_to_kill_goyim_and_influence_people%3A_israeli_rabbis_defend_book%27s_shocking_religious_defense_of_killing_non-jews_%28with_video%29" target="_blank">described</a> as "230 pages on the laws concerning the killing of non-Jews, a kind of guidebook for anyone who ponders the question of if and when it is permissible to take the life of a non-Jew."</p><p dir="ltr">To orchestrate his futile attempt to scuttle a diplomatic imperative of the Obama administration, Netanyahu drew on these deep ties to the Kusher family. There are troubling indications that his intelligence agencies shared material that it gathered by spying on the US with Kushner and the Trump transitional team.</p><p dir="ltr">Eli Lake, a neoconservative columnist for Bloomberg who frequently relies on sources from both Trump and Netanyahu's inner circles, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-01/kushner-is-said-to-have-ordered-flynn-to-contact-russia" target="_blank">reported</a> that Israel's "envoys shared their own intelligence about the Obama administration's lobbying efforts to get member states to support the [UN] resolution with the Trump transition team."</p><p dir="ltr">The subtext here was clear: Israel, a country that <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-spied-on-iran-talks-1427164201" target="_blank">surveilled</a> American diplomats during Iran deal negotiations in 2015 and which is notorious for its espionage across the West, had spied on the Obama administration during the lead-up to the UN vote and shared its "intelligence" with the Trump team. Once again, collusion has seldom been demonstrated as clearly or disturbingly as this.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>A Clinton mega-donor defends Kushner's collusion</strong></p><p dir="ltr">So why isn't this angle of the Flynn indictment getting more attention? An easy explanation could be deduced from the <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-lobby-billionaire-praises-kushner-collusion-netanyahu" target="_blank">stunning spectacle</a> that unfolded this December 2 at the Brookings Institution, where the fresh-faced Kushner engaged in a "keynote conversation" with Israeli-American oligarch Haim Saban.</p><p>"You've been in the news the last few days, to say the least. But you've been in the news about an issue that I personally want to thank you for, because you and your team were taking steps to try and get the United Nations Security Council to not go along with what ended up being an abstention by the US," Saban remarked to Kushner. "As far as I know there was nothing illegal there but I think that this crowd and myself want to thank you for making that effort."</p><p dir="ltr">Kushner nervously scanned the room, mumbled "thank you" to his host and forced an uncomfortable smile.</p><p>Saban's political background lent special significance to his robust defense of Trump's son-in-law. Having earned his fortune in television and the Israeli telecom industry, he has become one of the Democratic Party's most generous individual donors. Saban's millions funded the construction of Democratic National Committee's headquarters and filled the campaign coffers of Bill and Hillary Clinton. In 2012, as a reward for Saban's handsome Super PAC donations to Obama, the president <a href="https://www.politico.com/blogs/politico44/2012/09/obama-nominates-mega-donor-haim-sabans-wife-to-un-post-136113" target="_blank">nominated</a> the billionaire's wife — a former Playboy <a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/6457/morphed" target="_blank">"Disco Queens"</a> model and children's fashion designer with no diplomatic experience — as special US representative to the United Nations general assembly.</p><p>The spectacle of a top Democratic Party money man defending one of the Trump administration's most influential figures was clearly intended to establish a patina of bipartisan normalcy around Kushner's collusion with the Netanyahu government. Saban's effort to protect the presidential son-in-law was supplemented by an op-ed in the Jewish Daily Forward <a href="http://www.apple.com/" target="_blank">headlined,</a> "Jared Kushner Was Right To 'Collude' With Russia — Because He Did It For Israel."</p><p>While the Israel lobby ran interference for Kushner, the favorite pundits of the liberal anti-Trump "Resistance" minimized the role of Israel in the Flynn saga. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, who has <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/04/12/msnbcs-rachel-maddow-sees-a-russia-connection-lurking-around-every-corner/" target="_blank">devoted</a> more content this year to Russia than to any other topic, appeared to entirely avoid the issue of Kushner's collusion with Israel.</p><p>There is simply too much at stake for too many to allow any disruption in the preset narrative. From the journalist pack that followed the trail of Russiagate down a conspiracy infested rabbit hole to the Clintonites seeking excuses for their mind-boggling campaign failures to the Cold Warriors exploiting the panic over Russian meddling to drive an unprecedented arms build-up, the narrative must go on, regardless of the facts.</p>
House Intel Committee to Subpoena Leftist Comedian and Civil Rights Activist Randy Credico in Russia Investigation
The House Intelligence Committee's Russia investigation has taken an unexpected turn, with investigators homing in on a New York City-based comedian, radio host and renowned civil rights activist named Randy Credico.
<p dir="ltr">Credico received a letter this month from the Committee ranking Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff, and Rep. Michael Conaway, the Republican leading the investigation. The lawmakers requested that Credico "participate in a voluntary, transcribed interview at the Committee's offices" during the first half of December.</p><p dir="ltr">Credico informed the House committee through his legal counsel that he would not submit to the voluntary interview. Soon after, his lawyer told him that the committee planned to issue a subpoena.</p><p dir="ltr">Credico is among the unlikeliest characters to have surfaced as a player in the ongoing Russiagate drama. For over two decades, he split time as a comedy professional while waging a tireless crusade against the war on drugs. The former host of a radio show on the Pacifica affiliate WBAI, Credico came into the company of high profile dissidents. Today his friends include the transparency activist targeted for arrest and prosecution by the US government: Julian Assange.</p><p dir="ltr">The Wikileaks founder was recently <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cia-director-pompeo-calls-wikileaks-hostile-intelligence-service-n746311" target="_blank">accused</a> by CIA Director Mike Pompeo of overseeing a "a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia." Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has suggested without evidence that Wikileaks <a href="http://mashable.com/2017/10/15/hillary-clinton-julian-assange/" target="_blank">collaborated</a> with the Russian government to subvert the 2016 presidential election in Donald Trump's favor.</p><p dir="ltr">This year, the Trump administration <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/000ce526-2629-11e7-8691-d5f7e0cd0a16">expanded</a> the federal grand jury seeking the arrest of Assange to cover the Wikileaks release of thousands of documents on CIA hacking tools. However, there is no claim so far that grand jury covered the release by Wikileaks of the Democratic National Commitee's emails in 2016. A United Nations working group <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=17012">ruled</a> that Assange was being arbitrarily detained. It has been seven years since he lost his freedom, and has been confined to a series of small rooms ever since. </p><p>According to Credico, he and Assange held "three meetings that were two to three hours each" at the Ecuadoran embassy in London where the online activist has received diplomatic asylum. They took place on September 6, and the 13th and 16th of November of this year. Credico said he traveled to London this November to attend the hearing of Stefania Maurizi, a correspondent from Italy's La Repubblica who had filed a Freedom of Information request <a href="http://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2017/11/10/news/seven_years_confined_how_a_foia_litigation_is_shedding_light_on_the_case_of_julian_assange-180733751/?refresh_ce">demanding</a> the press's right to access documents regarding his case. (He showed me a photograph of himself with Maurizi in London to prove his point).</p><p>"I was just there to support [Assange] as a wing man," Credico commented to me. "I don't agree with him on everything — it's the fact that he's a journalist and a publisher and has not put anything out that's false. I don't know anything about technology and he didn't give me any secrets."</p><p dir="ltr">The letter Credico received from the House Intelligence Committee did not specify what it suspected him of doing, stating only that his interview could cover anything within the parameters of "Russian cyber-activities against the 2016 US election, potential links between Russia and individuals associated with political campaigns, the US government's response to these Russian active measures, and related leaks of classified information."</p><p dir="ltr">However, Credico is convinced that he is being used to undermine Assange. "This is about chilling Wikileaks and that starts with intimidating anyone who has met with Julian [Assange]," he stated.</p><p><strong>Satirist and civil rights crusader</strong></p><p dir="ltr">Credico first appeared in the national spotlight in 1984 when he trashed Reagan's Central American proxy wars during a comedy set on the Tonight Show. A look of severe discomfort could be seen on Johnny Carson's face when Credico likened Reagan's neoconservative UN ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick to Eva Braun. Though he was never invited back on the show, the comic's uncanny impersonations and incendiary political satire won him the admiration of peers like Larry David, Barry Crimmins and Jack Black.</p><p dir="ltr">During the 1990s, Credico became outraged about the disproportionate toll the war on drugs was taking on the poor and people of color. He launched a furious crusade against New York State's draconian Rockefeller Laws, howling outside courthouses across the city about the evils of mass incarceration, cops he branded "slave catchers" and proceedings he denounced as "modern-day slave auctions." When he wasn't screaming in the streets, he was behind prison walls, befriending inmates and working the phones to get reporters interested in their cases.</p><p dir="ltr">The New Yorker's Jennifer Gonnerman estimated that Credico had "generated more than a hundred news stories, largely by inviting reporters to his events and introducing them to the families of inmates." <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-man-who-screamed-so-loud-the-drug-laws-changed" target="_blank">Crediting him</a> for helping force the New York legislature to rewrite the Rockefeller drug laws in 2004, Gonnerman branded Credico, "The Man Who Screamed So Loud the Drug Laws Changed."</p><p dir="ltr">Credico's efforts to expose the drug war's injustices culminated in Tulia, Texas, where a corrupt undercover narcotics officer had <a href="https://www.aclu.org/other/racist-arrests-tulia-texas" target="_blank">railroaded</a> some 10 percent of the town's African American population into lengthy jail sentences for drug crimes they did not commit. Credico's agitation resulted in a wave of national <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/29/opinion/kafka-in-tulia.html" target="_blank">media attention</a> and in 2003, the full acquittal of the 38 prisoners with sentences up to 90 years. His efforts were honored by the NAACP and became the subject of several documentaries, including "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96cUhhiUhw4" target="_blank">60 Spins Around the Sun</a>," an award winning biographical chronicle financed by Jack Black.</p><p dir="ltr">In 2009, Credico quit his job as the director of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice and launched a long-shot senate campaign against Chuck Schumer, slamming the omnipotent Democratic senator for his role in mandatory minimum sentencing and pro-death penalty legislation. "You have to take a look at his record," Credico <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathleen-wells/randy-credico-to-challeng_b_564039.html" target="_blank">said</a> of Schumer at the time. "And that's a really racist position as far as I am concerned. Yes, it is about race."</p><p dir="ltr">In the end, Credico won one percent of the vote. But he soldiered on, running for mayor in 2013, then the governor's office a year later. All along, he was dogged by drug and alcohol addiction, which he has been public about. His penchant for drunken late-night tirades began to alienate his allies and even led him to contemplate suicide. An intervention in 2014 by his friend, the comedian Crimmins, pulled Credico back from from the brink and helped him kick his self-destructive habits.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Meetings with Assange, conspiratorial rumors</strong></p><p dir="ltr">Credico's sobriety coincided with intensive advocacy for the community of national security whistleblowers that emerged after 9/11 to expose secret government torture, assassination and mass surveillance programs. In August 2015, he hosted Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for an interview on "Live on the Fly, his former show at the Pacifica radio affiliate, WBAI. Several interviews followed over the coming months, including a series, "<a href="https://www.wbai.org/recentprogram.php?recentid=72" target="_blank">Assange: Countdown to Freedom</a>," that featured high-profile whistleblowers like Thomas Drake and Jesslyn Raddack advocating for Assange's release.</p><p dir="ltr">"I had to build an audience at a moribund station and I got 65 percent of the traffic," Credico remarked. "I had a popular international show because it was tweeted out by Wikileaks and Anonymous Scandinavia and I got a huge international following."</p><p dir="ltr">The relationship with Assange eventually developed into a series of meetings at the Ecuadoran embassy in London. These encounters fueled <a href="https://storify.com/italkyoubored/theory-that-roger-stone-s-go-between-for-wikileaks" target="_blank">online rumors</a> accusing Credico of serving as a courier between the notoriously Machiavellian former Trump campaign advisor, Roger Stone, and Assange.</p><p dir="ltr">This September, Stone testified before the House Intelligence Committee, which sought to scrutinize his claim to have communicated with the hacker known as Guccifer 2.0, his contacts with Wikileaks, and a tweet that seemed to suggest he had advance knowledge of the release of the emails of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta. Before the committee, Stone angrily denied having colluded with the Russian government and <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/352467-roger-stone-testifies-hes-been-falsely-accused-of-collusion" target="_blank">claimed</a> that all of his contacts with Assange were conducted through "an intermediary."</p><p dir="ltr">For his part, Credico freely acknowledged that Stone had been a guest on his WBAI show and the two had cooperated on a few oddball political initiatives over the years. But he contended that "Roger Stone is just a whipping post for the committee but the one they're after is Assange because they want to quiet him."</p><p dir="ltr">"They're looking for a way to do in Assange," Credico emphasized, "and I'm the only American in the press that has visited him outside of a reporter from the New Yorker, and he's not going to talk to anyone else."</p><p dir="ltr">Credico also insisted that despite his well-known dislike for Hillary Clinton, he would not have lifted a finger to help the Trump campaign: "I hate Trump. He's got ethnic cleansing going on with the deportation of Haitians and Latin Americans and [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions is the worst nightmare I've ever seen."</p><p>Asked if he would comply with the House Intelligence Committee, Credico sounded a defiant tone. "I'm a journalist with a radio show and there's nothing [the committee] can elicit out of me because I'm covered by the First Amendment. And everything I've talked to Assange about has been on the show, and everything else is in my fucking notes. Would any journalist give them their notes?"</p><p dir="ltr">With his "interview" just days away, Credico exuded confidence. "I've worked strip joints in Florida filled with Marines that wanted to kill me for attacking their war in Grenada," the former comedian remarked. "Congress is no problem. I've worked much tougher rooms than that."</p><p style=" margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none; display: block;"><a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/365616997/House-Intelligence-Committee-letter-to-Randy-Credico#from_embed" style="text-decoration: underline;" title="View House Intelligence Committee letter to Randy Credico on Scribd">House Intelligence Committee letter to Randy Credico</a> by <a href="https://www.scribd.com/user/31516247/Max-Blumenthal#from_embed" style="text-decoration: underline;" title="View Max Blumenthal's profile on Scribd">Max Blumenthal</a> on Scribd</p><p><iframe class="scribd_iframe_embed" data-aspect-ratio="null" data-auto-height="true" data-rm-shortcode-id="f26ec22a01bd679ddf9e9ade6a4d9da2" frameborder="0" height="600" scrolling="no" src="https://www.scribd.com/embeds/365616997/content?start_page=1&amp;show_recommendations=true" width="100%"></iframe></p>
Exposing the Shocking and Continuing Alliance Between Zionism and Anti-Semitism
At its annual gala this November, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) feted Sebastian Gorka alongside fellow Trump White House alumni Steven Bannon and Sean Spicer. The ZOA's president, Morton Klein, has established a special relationship with the Trump administration, going out of his way to defend Gorka against accusations of Nazi sympathies.
<p dir="ltr">On the eve of Trump's election, Gorka <a href="https://lobelog.com/why-is-trump-adviser-wearing-medal-of-nazi-collaborators/">appeared</a> in nationally televised interviews clad in a black uniform bearing the medal of the Vitezi Rend, a Hungarian fascist group that collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust. Speaking at a conference organized by the right-wing Israeli newspaper the <a href="https://youtu.be/6_hQajdhf8g?t=16m12s">Jerusalem Post</a> in May, Gorka defended his wearing the medal, proclaiming, "My father was awarded a medal in 1979 by anti-communist members of a splinter order outside Hungary ... I am proud to wear that, as a response to everything that we face today."</p><p dir="ltr">Vitzezi Rend has appeared on a US <a href="https://fam.state.gov/searchapps/viewer?format=html&amp;query=vitezi&amp;links=VITEZI&amp;url=/FAM/09FAM/09FAM030207.html">State Department list</a> of "organizations under the direction of the Nazi government of Germany," and its late founder, Miklos Horthy, reportedly <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/sebastian-gorka-made-nazi-linked-vitezi-rend-proud-wearing-its-n742851?utm_content=buffer24d59&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=facebook.com&amp;utm_campaign=buffer">declared</a>, "I have always been an anti-Semite throughout my life." During the anti-communist <a href="http://www.academia.edu/23180063/Aristocracy_and_the_White_Terror_Journal_of_Contemorary_History">White Terror</a> that took place between 1919 and 1921 in Hungary, Horthy presided over some 60 pogroms, and attacks on Jews continued through the 1920's. When Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, Horthy <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/holocaust-and-hungary-prime-minister-180964139/">participated in the deportation</a> of 437,000 Jews to concentration camps.</p><p dir="ltr">Gorka's attachment to a fascist order that reveres Horthy and his anti-Jewish legacy has not appeared to trouble supporters of Israel's right-wing government. Not only has Gorka been an honored guest of the ZOA, he was welcomed by the Jerusalem Post, which <a href="http://www.jpost.com/American-Politics/At-JPost-conference-Trump-aide-Gorka-denies-antisemitism-accusations-490014">received him</a> with warm applause and a prominent speaking slot at its annual conference this May in New York. "The real agenda is clear: Gorka has written forcefully about the need to defeat the jihadi threat to Western civilization," an <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-Forward-is-dead-wrong-Sebastian-Gorka-is-a-defender-of-Israel-and-Jews-484471">op-ed defending</a> Gorka in the Jerusalem Post read.</p><p dir="ltr">Along with his vitriolic anti-Muslim politics, Gorka's full-throated support for Israeli settler colonialism has earned him the abiding friendship of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's political network. For them, the rest — especially his membership in an organization that assisted in the extermination of Jews — is commentary.</p><p dir="ltr">This scenario is a microcosm of the disturbing dynamic playing out across Europe, where ultra-nationalist political parties with fascist roots are forging alliances with Israel's leadership. Drawn together by a dedication to a perceived "clash of civilizations" between the Judeo-Christian West and the Islamic world, officials from the far-right <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/loathed-by-jews-germanys-far-right-afd-loves-the-jewish-state/">Alternative For Deutschland</a> and the Austrian Freedom Party have been received for official visits by Israel's governing Likud Party and even <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/far-right-austrian-freedom-party-chief-visits-israel/">treated to visits</a> at Yad Vashem, the country's Holocaust memorial museum.</p><p dir="ltr">In Ukraine, Dmitry Yarosh, the leader of the neo-Nazi street fighting organization known as Right Sector, was granted a <a href="http://alternettest.wpengine.com/world/how-israel-lobby-protected-ukrainian-neo-nazis">private audience</a> in 2014 with Israel's ambassador, who proclaimed that "Right Sector will oppose all [racist] phenomena, especially anti-Semitism, with all legitimate means." Under the watch of Yarosh and his allies, neo-Nazism has since exploded across Ukraine, with mass marches of torch-bearing fascists filling the streets of Kiev and monuments to pogromist Nazi collaborators sprouting up around the country. "Ukraine has more statues 4 killers of Jews than any other country," the anti-Nazi activist and researcher Efraim Zuroff <a href="https://twitter.com/EZuroff/status/920304904480190464">lamented</a> on Twitter.</p><p dir="ltr">According to Joseph Massad, a professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University and the author of the new book <em><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo19211851.html">Islam in Liberalism</a></em>, the emerging alliance between Zionists and European ultra-nationalists reflects an ongoing historical development that dates back to the late 19th century.</p><p></p><p dir="ltr">In a wide-ranging discussion with me and Ben Norton for our weekly podcast <a href="http://moderaterebelsradio.com/">Moderate Rebels</a>, Massad explained why, in his words, "Israel has no problem allying itself with anti-Semites who support its colonialism." He asserted, "The problem [for Zionists] is not pro or anti-Jewishness with Israel, it's pro-colonialism or anti-colonialism. Pro-Zionism as an colonial movement or not."</p><p dir="ltr">Massad detailed the collaboration between Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, and anti-Semites like Vyacheslav von Plehve, who oversaw brutal pogroms as the police chief of imperial Russia. Arthur Balfour, the former British Prime Minister and author of the Aliens Act that barred the immigration of Eastern European Jews to Britain, was also a key ally of Herzl and his Zionist Congress, which partnered with him on the infamous Balfour Declaration in 1917 "notwithstanding or precisely because of his anti-Semitic sentiment," Massad noted.</p><p dir="ltr">Zionists like Herzl and anti-Semites like Balfour shared the view that the presence of assimilationist-minded Jews on the continent was unacceptable. Herzl "disdained poor Jews in Western Europe and blamed them for anti-Semitism," according to Massad, and even argued that it was in the best interest of rich Jews to send poor Jews away to a colony in historic Palestine as it would reduce friction with Christian anti-Semites and allow poor gentiles to take their jobs.</p><p dir="ltr">Like Herzl, anti-Semitic European elites viewed a Jewish state as a convenient means for reducing the Jewish population within their societies. "The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies," Herzl <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/05/2013521184814703958.html">declared</a>.</p><p dir="ltr">"Anti-Semites saw in Zionism a kindred spirit and they shared with other Zionists the understanding that getting rid of European Jews somewhere else is a goal that they share," Massad stated.</p><p dir="ltr">The alliance deepened during World War Two, as the Zionist movement broke the international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany to embark on a lucrative Transfer Agreement with Hitler's government that exchanged Jewish property for the bodies the Zionists needed to colonize Palestine. As Massad pointed out, when the fugitive Nazi functionary Adolph Eichmann was captured in 1960 and brought to Israel for trial a year later for war crimes, it was his second visit to the Holy Land. Indeed, Eichmann had been a guest of the Zionist movement in 1937, hosted for a tour of kibbutzim in historic Palestine by a double Zionist-Nazi agent named Feibl Folkes.</p><p dir="ltr">"Eichmann quoted Folkes to the effect that Zionist leaders were pleased by the persecution of European Jewry, since it would encourage emigration to Palestine," the Israeli historian Tom Segev <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=TKOnSTjP1IsC&amp;pg=PA30&amp;lpg=PA30&amp;dq=feibl+folkes+eichmann&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=9tPNtE1QC9&amp;sig=Z0qZeR4dUbijBbLE3MkRO-SK6O0&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwj25e6V3dHXAhVC4YMKHQysD84Q6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&amp;q=feibl%20folkes%20eichmann&amp;f=false">noted</a> in his book <em>The Seventh Million</em>.</p><p dir="ltr">When anti-Semitism reared its head in US-aligned nations after the war, the state of Israel generally kept quiet. The disturbing silence was vividly illustrated during the liberal rebellion that momentarily seized power in Hungary in 1956. With assistance from the CIA, which aimed to wrest the country from the Warsaw Pact, the former commanders of Horthy's collaborationist army were returned to Budapest, where they inspired widespread violence against Hungarian Jews.</p><p dir="ltr">As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency <a href="https://www.jta.org/2006/10/25/life-religion/features/1956-crises-decimated-two-communities">reported</a>, "the fact that Hungary's top four Communist leaders were of Jewish origin — including the dictator Matyas Rakosi, who reigned at the height of the Communist terror in the early 1950s — lent credibility to the idea of communism as Jewish revenge for the Holocaust." (Herbert Aptheker's 1956 book <em>The Truth About Hungary</em> is one of the most thorough chronicles of the return of fascism to the country during its anti-Soviet revolt, and can be read <a href="https://espressostalinist.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/the-truth-about-hungary.pdf">here</a> for free).</p><p dir="ltr">While Soviet tanks put an end to the crisis, Israel drew critical benefits from its fallout. Thousands of Jewish refugees streamed out of Hungary and into the hands of an Israeli government desperate for fodder in its demographic trench war against the indigenous Palestinian population. It was not the first time that an eruption of anti-Semitism would serve the interests of the Zionist movement, and it would hardly be the last.</p><p>"That strategy would continue from Herzl on," said Massad. "It was a continuing ideological cornerstone of Zionism, it has never stopped — we are speaking about something that is simply continuous."</p><p>You can listen to our full conversation with Massad as well as previous episodes of Moderate Rebels <a href="https://soundcloud.com/moderaterebelsradio">here</a>. And if you happen to like the work we're doing, you can support us at <a href="https://www.patreon.com/ModerateRebels">our Patreon page</a>.</p>
Why Harvey Weinstein Turned to Israeli Intelligence Veterans to Suppress His Sex Abuse Accusers
In a bid to suppress some of the revelations of his flagrant acts of sexual harassment and abuse, Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein contracted a private Israeli intelligence firm called Black Cube to spy on his accusers. Black Cube arranged for a female former Israeli soldier and actress named Stella Penn Pechanac to trick actress and alleged Weinstein victim Rose McGowan into a private meeting. Pechanac secured the tete-a-tete by posing as "Diana Filip," a women's rights advocate employed by a bogus investment firm called Reuben Partners.
<p dir="ltr">With an offer of $60,000 to serve as the face of a women's rights campaign, Pechanac, as <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/harvey-weinsteins-army-of-spies"><em>The New Yorker</em> reported</a>, successfully tricked McGowan into disclosing details of her memoir, which apparently contained details about Weinstein's abusive behavior. Pechanac also posed as a Weinstein victim named "Anna" in a failed attempt to elicit information from journalist Ben Wallace, who was planning to expose Weinstein's sexual harassment for<em> New York Magazine</em>. (Wallace's report never appeared, leading to <a href="https://pagesix.com/2017/10/08/new-york-magazine-fumbled-its-own-harvey-weinstein-expose/">speculation</a> that Weinstein applied pressure to magazine higher-ups.)</p><p dir="ltr">Weinstein has also been a close ally of the pro-Israel lobby that carries sway from Hollywood to Capitol Hill, trading heavy donations for awards that burnished his reputation within Jewish communal circles. In the heart of the world of Israeli advocacy, where Weinstein said, "we are gonna have to get as organized as the mafia," he was set up with a private spying network that specialized in protecting powerful miscreants like himself. He was introduced to the Black Cube intelligence firm by none other than former Israeli Prime Minister and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/29/ehud-barak-war-crimes-israel">accused war criminal</a> Ehud Barak.</p><p dir="ltr">"I'm an Israeli in my heart and mind. I love that country, I love what it stands for," Weinstein <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAt7ZPtCtxM">proclaimed</a> this September.</p><p dir="ltr">Weinstein made those comments during an interview at the "Jewish 100" gala for Algemeiner, a right-wing pro-Israel publication that has routinely demonized advocates of Palestinian human rights as anti-Semitic.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>"We are gonna have to get as organized as the mafia"</strong></p><p dir="ltr">Weinstein has also been publicly honored by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a right-wing pro-Israel group that publishes an annual list of "anti-Semitic incidents." Like its close affiliate, Algemeiner, the Wiesenthal Center wantonly exploits accusations of anti-Jewish bigotry to tarnish advocates of Palestinian human rights.</p><p dir="ltr">In 2015, the Simon Wiesenthal Center bestowed Weinstein with its "Humanitarian Award." Introduced at the organization's annual gala as "a nice Jewish boy" by Jeffrey Katzenberg, a fellow film producer and prolific Democratic Party donor, Weinstein launched into a <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/harvey-weinstein-urges-jews-take-784210">tirade</a> against the forces he believed were arrayed against the Jewish world.</p><p dir="ltr">First, Weinstein expressed panic over an <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/is-it-time-for-the-jews-to-leave-europe/386279/">article</a> published in the <em>Atlantic</em> by journalist and former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg entitled, "Is it time for the Jews to leave Europe?"</p><p>Weinstein warned: "It's like, here we go again, we're right back where we were [before the Holocaust]. And the lessons of the past are we better stand up and kick these guys in the ass," the serial sex abuser told his audience.</p><p dir="ltr">"While we must be understanding of our Arab brothers and our Islamic brothers," Weinstein continued, "we also have to understand that these crazy bastards are also killing their own—they're killing neighbors, they're killing people from all sorts of different races."</p><p dir="ltr">Finally, Weinstein declared that "we are gonna have to get as organized as the mafia… as they say in <em>The Godfather</em>, 'back to the mattresses,' and back to the idea that we will not ever forget what happened to us."</p><p dir="ltr">This year, after revelations of Weinstein's serial sex abuse emerged, the Simon Wiesenthal Center balked at pressure to remove Weinstein from its roster of honorees. Days later, the group condemned the disgraced film producer and <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/wiesenthal-center-removes-harvey-weinsteins-name-from-roster-of-honorees">rescinded its award</a>, which it had given Weinstein after tendering $100,000 in donations from him over the years.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>The ex-Mossad "organized crime group"</strong></p><p dir="ltr">By the fall of 2016, Weinstein sensed that his ugly history was beginning to catch up with him. He reached out to his friend, Ehud Barak, for help in contacting a vaunted business intelligence firm based out of Tel Aviv called Black Cube. Barak "was asked by Weinstein if he knows about an Israeli security firm that Weinstein had heard about and can help him deal with business issues he's currently facing," according to a <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/1.821590">statement</a> by the former Israeli prime minister's representatives. They added that Barak "transferred to Weinstein information that allowed him to reach out to them on his own."</p><p dir="ltr">Israeli Channel 2 reported that Weinstein invited Black Cube's founder and Barak to a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton. Weinstein was among Clinton's most dedicated <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-harvey-weinstein-donations_us_59deae70e4b0eb18af06157d">contributors</a>, having bundled hundreds of thousands of dollars for her political campaigns and those of her husband, Bill, since the 1990s.</p><p dir="ltr">On its website, Black Cube describes itself as "a select group of veterans from the Israeli elite intelligence units that specializes in tailored solutions to complex business and litigation challenges." As journalist Ali Abunimah <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/harvey-weinstein-used-israeli-spies-effort-silence-victims">noted</a>, Black Cube's advisory board is comprised of Israeli military-intelligence honchos from the late former Mossad chief Meir Dagan to the ex-general Giora Eiland, who has explicitly <a href="https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4554583,00.html">urged</a> Israel's military to wage war on the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. The firm's board is also occupied by "E.J.," a former Israeli intelligence operative who still conceals his identity while serving as "director of corporate affairs in one of the biggest industry groups in Israel."</p><p dir="ltr">In April 2016, Black Cube's co-founders Dan Zorella and Avi Yanus—both former Mossad agents—came under criminal investigation in Romania along with two other Black Cube operatives, who were arrested. According to <a href="https://www.romania-insider.com/rise-project-former-mossad-agents-spy-on-romanias-chief-anticorruption-prosecutor/168232/">Romania Insider</a>, the Israeli private spies had "set up an organized crime group that harassed and carried cyber-attacks on Romania's chief anticorruption prosecutor Laura Codruta Kovesi." Kovesi accused Black Cube of waging "an unsuccessful intimidation attempt" against her, possibly on behalf of powerful business interests she was investigating.</p><p dir="ltr">To extract private information from Weinstein's accusers, Black Cube deployed an expert in velvet glove methods of subterfuge. She was Stella Penn Pechanac, a former Israeli air force officer and aspiring actress who had made a cameo appearance in a 2010 music video by Israeli pop balladeer Rudi Saada. (The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EokGEBMZYc">video</a> depicted Saada seducing another woman, then sawing her to pieces and stuffing her dismembered body parts in a trash can.)</p><p dir="ltr">As journalist Allison Deger <a href="http://mondoweiss.net/2017/11/weinsteins-holocaust-backstory/">reported</a>, Pechanac was awarded an Argov hasbara fellowship in 2015 by the Israeli university, IDC Herzilya. The program was designed to train youthful, English-speaking Israelis to propagandize on the country's behalf, and specifically to defend its grisly military campaigns against the Gaza Strip. "This cadre—which will work in both the public and private sector—will provide a wellspring of talent able to effectively present Israel's case to the international community," the program's founder, Gideon Argov, <a href="https://www.idc.ac.il/en/specialprograms/argov/pages/words-from-the-founder.aspx">explained</a>.</p><p dir="ltr">Before long, Pechanac was pipelined from Israel's global propaganda apparatus into the world of private spying.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Israel's rape culture</strong></p><p dir="ltr">Why any self-respecting 38-year-old woman would pose as a feminist champion in order to help an ultra-wealthy serial sex abuser intimidate his victims into submission is difficult to explain. Without a doubt, Pechanac's work was heavily compensated by her client, but her own experiences might have also factored into her motives as well. After all, she had served in the ranks of a military where sexual harassment had been virtually normalized, and where female conscripts were often expected to satisfy the urges of their male superiors.</p><p dir="ltr">A 2003 survey provided to the Knesset Committee for the Advancement of the Status of Women in the Israeli Army found that one out of three female soldiers had been sexually attacked during her service, and that at least 80 percent had faced sexual harassment. Shlomo Benizri, a right-wing former member of Knesset, referred to new female army recruits as "fresh mattresses," while ex-Israeli president Ezer Weizman said of his country's air force, "The best men to the cockpit, the best women to the pilots."</p><p dir="ltr">Countless Israeli political leaders have been accused or convicted of sexual assault and related violations. They range from former <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/katsav-rape-victim-i-tried-to-resist-but-he-was-my-boss-1.337330">president Moshe Katsav</a>, who was convicted of rape and the indecent assault of female subordinates, to <a href="https://www.jta.org/2001/03/21/life-religion/features/yitzhak-mordechai-guilty-of-sexual-assault">Yitzhak Mordechai, the ex-army chief of staff</a> convicted of sexually assaulting two female soldiers working in his office, to <a href="https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/Silvan-Shalom-officially-resigns-amid-sexual-misconduct-allegations-438323">Silvan Shalom, who resigned</a> as Interior Minister in 2015 after accusations came to light that he sexually harassed 11 women.</p><p dir="ltr">A 2016 <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Majority-of-female-Knesset-have-experienced-sexual-assault-455571">study</a> by Israeli Channel 2 found that 28 of 32 female members of Israel's Knesset complained of sexual harassment. "When I was younger, right after I immigrated to Israel, there was a period when I wouldn't go outside because of all the harassment," member of Knesset Ksenia Svetlova said. Overall, one in four Israeli women has reported being sexually assaulted, according to a study by Abigail Moor, the head of the women's studies program at Tel-Hai College in northern Israel.</p><p dir="ltr">It is no coincidence that Weinstein looked to Israel for help in suppressing his accusers. Among the veterans of the country's military-intelligence apparatus, he found experts in subterfuge that were willing to carry out their duties without moral limits—"organized as the mafia," just as he said he sought.</p>
McCarthyism Inc: Introducing the Counter-Terror 'Experts' Hyping Russian Threats and Undermining Our Civil Liberties
Read Part I of this investigation.
<p dir="ltr">This September, Oklahoma GOP Senator James Lankford <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/football/ct-james-lankford-russian-trolls-nfl-national-anthem-20170927-story.html">alleged</a> that the widely popular #taketheknee Twitter hashtag that promoted NFL protests against racial injustice was, in fact, a Russian influence campaign spawned by Kremlin operatives. Hours later, Lankford's claims received <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/technology/twitter-russia-election.html">uncritical coverage</a> from the New York Times' Scott Shane and Daisuke Wakabayashi, who asserted that Russia was attempting "to influence social media discourse and foment division in the United States." The assertion by Lankford added fuel to a wider narrative darkly insinuating covert Russian influence behind Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements.</p><p dir="ltr">The New York Times cited a new organization called the Alliance for Securing Democracy as the source of the allegations about the NFL protests. According to the Times, the ASD has tracked 600 Twitter accounts supposedly "linked to Russian influence operations" and exposed their nefarious agenda. A day before Lankford's comments, the ASD asserted that a Russian online influence network had amplified the trending hashtag promoting NFL protests, #taketheknee, with the aim of promoting racial disharmony in the United States. Given that ASD refuses to name the Twitter accounts it is monitoring, the allegation is almost impossible to verify. </p><p dir="ltr">ASD researchers and advisors have become go-to pundits for mainstream reporters seeking expert opinions on Russian online meddling. They have been <a href="https://twitter.com/johnpodesta/status/892818113531654147?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmeduza.io%2Fen%2Ffeature%2F2017%2F08%2F03%2Ftracking-russian-propaganda-in-real-time">endorsed by John Podesta</a>, the founder of the Center for American Progress and chief of staff for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. Julia Ioffe, the Atlantic's Russia correspondent, has also <a href="https://twitter.com/juliaioffe/status/892778139939688448?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmeduza.io%2Fen%2Ffeature%2F2017%2F08%2F03%2Ftracking-russian-propaganda-in-real-time">weighed in</a> to promote the ASD's efforts. Both highlighted the ASD's Hamilton 68 Dashboard as a scientific barometer of Kremlin influence over the American social media landscape.</p><p dir="ltr">According to the New York Times, the ASD is a "public policy research group in Washington," and a "bipartisan initiative" with no apparent agenda other than scrubbing the stain of subversion out of American democracy. Hosted by the German Marshall Fund, one of the most respected think tanks in Washington, the ASD has been granted the patina of credibility.</p><p dir="ltr">However, an investigation by AlterNet's Grayzone Project has yielded a series of disturbing findings at odds with the established depiction. The researchers behind the ASD's "dashboard" are no Russia experts, but rather a collection of cranks, counterterror retreads, online harassers and paranoiacs operating with support from some of the most prominent figures operating within the American national security apparatus.</p><p dir="ltr">Andrew Weisburd, an ASD fellow who inspired and helped design its Hamilton 68 dashboard, has been solicited by the New York Times and Washington Post for expert quotes on Russian meddling. Neither outlet bothered to mention Weisburd's well-documented history of online vigilantism, including his founding of a one-man, anti-Palestinian web monitoring initiative that specialized in doxxing left-wing activists, Muslims and anyone he considered "anti-American." Weisburd's murderous and homophobic fantasies about Glenn Greenwald, the editor of a publication the ASD has flagged without explanation as a vehicle for Russian influence operations, have also passed without notice by reporters promoting his findings.</p><p dir="ltr">In recent days, the ASD's master Kremlinologists have branded major American online outlets including the <a href="https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/913518006357172226">Intercept</a>, Antiwar.com, ESPN, and even the U.S. military newspaper <a href="https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/914623741811937281">Stars and Stripes</a> as vehicles for Kremlin propaganda. ASD researchers emphasized that the outlets they placed within Russia's supposed influence network were merely "relevant to Russian messaging themes." But they failed to explain how they became relevant, making it almost impossible to know why the outlets listed on the dashboard were being amplified by any Russian influence operation, or whether they were at all.</p><p dir="ltr">The first part of this investigation introduced the ASD's most prominent figure, Clint Watts, the self-styled national security expert whose high-profile—and factually deficient—Senate testimony introduced America to the supposed menace of Russian bots. Watts flaunts a bio that makes it appear as though his opinions on Russian "active measures" are backed by academic credentials. However, he has no record of scholarship on Russia, does not appear to speak Russian and has no professional experience inside Russia. He has, however, confessed to wasting "billions" of taxpayer dollars on a failed "influence operation" allegedly waged by the U.S. military in the Middle East. As a fellow at the right-wing Foreign Policy Research Institute, Watts has urged American intelligence agencies to encourage jihadists to carry out terrorist attacks against Russia and Iran.</p><p dir="ltr">The composition of the ASD's <a href="http://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/team/advisory-council">advisory council</a> has also been exempted from mainstream media scrutiny. A look at the Beltway power players behind the group reveals a collection of military interventionists from both parties, all united in their desire for intensified conflict with Russia. They include neoconservative former Bush advisors like Kori Schake and Democrats like Jake Sullivan, an ardent military interventionist who served as the top foreign policy advisor to the 2016 Clinton campaign. Another Clinton surrogate, the former CIA director Michael Morrell, advises the ASD. Morrell <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ivt2NmbyGg">has said</a> that the U.S. should support Islamist insurgents in Syria in order to "have the Russians and the Iranians pay a little price." Morrell added that he wanted to "bomb [Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's] offices in the middle of the night."</p><p dir="ltr">To round out its board of advisors, the ASD recruited the most recognizable face of neoconservatism in Washington, Bill Kristol. A founder of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and a vocal supporter of every war the U.S. has waged, Kristol complained in 2014 that Americans were "war weary." He <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/war-weariness-excuse/article/784895">clamored for a public relations campaign</a> to influence them in favor of open-ended military operations, urging a "rallying" of pro-war spirit. This year, Kristol openly <a href="https://twitter.com/billkristol/status/831497364661747712?lang=en">endorsed</a> a "deep state" coup to oust the Trump administration.</p><p dir="ltr">(Kristol's son-in-law, Matthew Continetti, is the editor-in-chief of the Free Beacon, the neoconservative online outlet that served as the <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/washington-free-beacon-funded-initial-fusion-gps-anti-trump-research-dossier/">initial financial channel</a> for funding the "dirty dossier" composed by a former British MI5 officer named Christopher Steele. Produced by Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm, the 35-page memo alleged that Vladimir Putin manipulated Trump through "kompromat" [compromising material] he gathered by secretly filming prostitutes urinating on Trump in the presidential suite of Moscow's Ritz Hotel. The document's <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2017/live-updates/trump-white-house/james-comey-testimony-what-we-learn/comey-alluding-to-classified-information-says-the-fbi-knew-sessions-would-recuse-himself/?utm_term=.ef25cddf18b7">most lurid claims remain</a> unsubstantiated.)</p><p dir="ltr">The ASD appears to have only one figure on its board of advisors who could be described as a Russia specialist—Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia under the Obama administration. In the early days of his tenure. McFaul invited tensions with Moscow by hosting a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9FfX0B8ujA">series of meetings</a> inside the American embassy with protest leaders and internal opponents of the country's leadership. The former diplomat has become a human factory for quotes on Russiagate, serving reporters with a reliable stream of soundbites reinforcing the narrative of Russian interference. He is currently <a href="https://www.hoover.org/profiles/michael-mcfaul">housed</a> at the Hoover Institution, a <a href="http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/hoover_institution/">right-wing think tank</a> that has provided a place for fellow militarists like Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld to cool their heels, while sponsoring neoconservative initiatives like the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.</p><p dir="ltr">The ASD's main sponsor is the German Marshall Fund, a trans-national think tank founded under the watch of German Chancellor Willy Brandt in 1972 to advance the special relationship between the US and Germany. As journalist James Carden <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/our-russia-fixation-is-devolving-into-an-assault-on-political-discourse/">explained</a>, the Marshall Fund's sponsorship of a group like ASD signals a radical break with Brandt's conciliatory approach, which carefully balanced ties to Washington with an "Ostpolitik" that stressed diplomacy toward his neighbors in the Warsaw Pact. The German Marshall Fund has not named the ASD funders pumping donations into its coffers, describing them on its <a href="http://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/about-securing-democracy">website</a> as "family foundations." German Marshall Fund public relations manager Kelsey Glover responded to specific questions about credentials of ASD researchers and the funders behind the initiative by directing me to explanations already featured on ASD's website.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Defining 'content attacking the U.S. and Europe' as Russian propaganda</strong></p><p dir="ltr">The ASD's Hamilton 68 dashboard purports to "help journalists and ordinary people alike identify Russian messaging themes and detect active disinformation or attack campaigns at the start." At first glance, it appears to be a scientifically accurate device for tracking Russian online influence. However, a closer examination of this seemingly data-centric initiative reveals a hyper-politicized project grounded in dubious methodology.</p><p dir="ltr">On their Hamilton 68 dashboard, ASD researchers claim to track the activities of 600 Twitter accounts supposedly linked to the Kremlin, along with the media outlets that seem to echo their messaging. If visitors to the dashboard read the group's <a href="http://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/publications/methodology-hamilton-68-dashboard">explanation of its monitoring methodology</a>, however, they will learn that not all of the accounts it tracks are controlled by Russian trolls. Some are simply "openly pro-Russian users," or those who "amplify themes promoted by Russian government media," while others that are monitored "have been influenced by the first two groups" and "may or may not understand themselves to be part of a pro-Russian social network." No information is provided to explain how Russian "themes" are identified.</p><p dir="ltr">Virtually any theme that emanates from Russian news services like RT and Sputnik is grounds for monitoring by ASD, even when they are based in fact and have little connection to any Russian foreign policy initiative. As Carden <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/our-russia-fixation-is-devolving-into-an-assault-on-political-discourse/">documented</a> in the Nation, ASD researchers have a penchant for labeling factual reporting featured on RT and Sputnik's Twitter accounts as "Russian propaganda" purely on the grounds that it casts the US and its allies in a negative light. The ASD openly states on its dashboard that it considers any "content attacking the U.S. and Europe" to be Russian propaganda.</p><p dir="ltr">More curiously, ASD has explicitly <a href="http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/about">refused to name</a> the Russian bot accounts that it claims to track. The group explained, "We are not willing to publicly attribute even one specific account incorrectly." This makes it impossible to know if the group has attributed any accounts correctly.</p><p dir="ltr">In perhaps the <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-russia-dominates-your-twitter-feed-to-promote-lies-and-trump-too">only case</a> in which the ASD named one of the "Russian" Twitter accounts it was tracking, the group fingered a Twitter user named Marcel Sardo, branding him as the possibly robotic ringleader of a sinister Kremlin-driven influence operation. But when the New York Times' Scott Shane <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/politics/russia-facebook-twitter-election.html">investigated</a> Sardo's identity, he discovered that the account in question belonged to an actual human—a 48-year-old computer programmer from Zurich with no ties to the Russian government. Indeed, Sardo was a private individual who openly sympathized with Russian foreign policy. </p><p dir="ltr">The questionable methodology behind ASD's Hamilton 68 dashboard was conceived by a team of researchers who earned their stripes in the so-called war on terror. They include J.M. Berger, a self-styled terror expert who has focused exclusively on Sunni jihadism. Also lending a hand was Jonathon Morgan, a computer scientist who <a href="https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/D3M_Jun2016_Roster.pdf">worked with</a> the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Neither of these figures has demonstrated any record of research, scholarship or journalism on Russia.</p><p dir="ltr">Then there was Andrew Weisburd, an ASD fellow whose vigilante tactics have provoked allegations of bigotry, extremism and malicious harassment.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Islamophobic agitator and former Putin admirer</strong></p><p dir="ltr">In early 2015, as tensions between U.S. and Russia simmered over conflicts in Syria, Ukraine and NATO expansion in eastern Europe, a computer programmer named Andrew Weisburd created a blog called "<a href="http://kremlintrolls.com/">Kremlin Trolls</a>." The site aimed to undermine recognizably pro-Russian news and opinion sites by publicizing their domain locations, IP providers and the personal details of those behind their operations, including phone numbers. This project was soon folded into a <a href="http://aktivnyye.com/index.html">blog</a> purporting to expose "KGB style active measures," which relied on the same techniques of blacklisting, doxxing and harassing that Weisburd had perfected years before when earned notoriety for his role in the mass shuttering of websites of Palestinians, Islamists and leftists.</p><p dir="ltr">According to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/07/jihad-20/304980/">the Atlantic</a>, Weisburd launched his online crusade "because he was mad—mad that Yasir Arafat had rejected the peace plan at Camp David in 2000, mad that al-Qaeda had blown up the buildings in Manhattan he grew up around, and mad because he had read that Hamas was teaching Palestinian kindergartners to hate Israelis."</p><p dir="ltr">There was also a strong body of evidence suggesting that Weisburd himself was simply mad.</p><p dir="ltr">Raised by parents in a mixed Catholic-Jewish marriage, Weisburd <a href="https://twitter.com/webradius/status/752254811353911296">confessed</a> that he developed a strong attraction to Jewish identity after his mother sent him to Catholic school at an early age. He also complained about the presence of "gay priests" in his school. As he came of age, Weisburd developed a strong attachment to the state of Israel, and an apparent affinity for some of its most extreme elements. While targeting websites he considered extremist, he sprinkled in a heavy dose of ultra-Zionist commentary, Islamophobia and fulsome admiration for Vladimir Putin.</p><p dir="ltr">An attic in Carbondale, Illinois, was the base for Weisburd's one-man war against online extremism. He focused heavily on hardline Islamists and jihadists, publishing the phone numbers of their IP providers and encouraging his followers to pester them until they agreed to shut the sites down. He also hounded Palestinian political factions and their supporters, as well as American leftists. His vehicle was Internet Haganah, a personal blog he described as "one part combat mission, one part intelligence operation, one part grassroots political action."</p><p dir="ltr">Though Weisburd's website has been defunct for years, a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20021111124741/http://www.simokyfed.com:80/mt/haganah/index.php">portion</a> of its <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20021113000742/http://www.simokyfed.com:80/mt/haganah/index.php">archives</a> was recovered for this article, and it offers a portrait of an enthusiastic Zionist rallying support for the Israeli military's draconian crackdown on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank city in 2002. The blog also features pornographically Islamophobic screeds blaming Arab Muslims for the Holocaust and accusing Palestinians of "child sacrifice."</p><p dir="ltr">Internet Haganah was also a platform for the writings of Daniel Pipes, a vehemently anti-Muslim scholar who has <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/5286/was-barack-obama-a-muslim">accused</a> Barack Obama of being a Muslim apostate, called for the <a href="https://harpers.org/blog/2007/09/giuliani-advisor-raze-palestinian-villages/">razing</a> of entire Palestinian villages and described Muslim immigrants as "brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene."</p><p dir="ltr">Weisburd might be known today for his obsessive efforts to counter Russian interference, but back in the months and years after 9/11, he was an unabashed admirer of Vladimir Putin. On Nov. 12, 2002, in a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20021113000742/http://www.simokyfed.com:80/mt/haganah/index.php">post on Internet Haganah</a>, Weisburd honored Putin as his "Tough Jew of the Week." Putin is a member in good standing of the Russian Orthodox Church, but Weisburd concluded that an angry tirade the Russian leader launched against radical Islamist terror somehow qualified him for the "Tough Jew" award.</p><p dir="ltr">By 2005, national media was taking notice of Weisburd's prolific efforts and puffing him in lengthy features as an online anti-terror hero, or a "solo maverick," as the Atlantic put it. None of these outlets, from <a href="https://www.wired.com/2005/02/watchdogs-sniff-out-terror-sites/">Wired</a> to <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/plain-text-heroes-or-nettlesome-hacks-121229">Newsweek</a>, seemed interested in Weisburd's anti-Muslim extremism, and few scrutinized the ethically dubious tactics he was accused of employing against his targets. Weisburd had boasted to reporters that he had forced hundreds of Islamic extremist websites offline, however, it was unclear which of these sites deserved to be censored.</p><p dir="ltr">Naziri, an administrator of a chat community for Shia Muslims called fitriyyah.org, protested that his site had been forced offline by Weisburd's vigilante efforts. Naziri <a href="http://www.shiachat.com/forum/topic/54217-proof-that-internet-haganah/">claimed</a> that his site was targeted for supporting terrorism despite its opposition to the tactics that Sunni extremist groups like Al Qaeda have used to massacre his fellow Shia. Naziri maintained, "we always have and always will unequivocally oppose the aforementioned illegal and immoral actions which masquerade under the term 'jihaad.'"</p><p>He explained how the host of his site had been "threatened over one hundred times in one weekend when Weisburd called for [the site host] to be 'pressured' to stop hosting us… It was all people calling him and threatening his life and safety over the weekend that Internet Haganah called for these illegal tactics to be implemented." Naziri claimed that many of the threats emanated from the Jewish Defense League, a violent extremist group which has been responsible for the terrorist assassination of an Arab-American civil rights organizer, firebombing Russian diplomats and Palestine solidarity activists, and attempting to murder Rep. Darrell Issa.</p><p dir="ltr">By his own admission, Weisburd did not speak Arabic, had no scholarly background in Islam or the politics of the Middle East, and no record of any time spent in the region. What's more, he had no credentials in law enforcement, though he would later earn a master's in criminology. He was an ideologically driven vigilante, acting according to his own rules, and according to his targets, was walking a fine line between legal conduct and malicious harassment. But Weisburd's methods were not without utility to a government that was surveilling and prosecuting American Muslims and antifa activists with unprecedented ferocity.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Victims of Weisburd</strong></p><p dir="ltr">In a post at the left-wing news and discussion forum, Indymedia, a group of anonymous leftists who described themselves as Victims of Weisburd spoke out about the tactics they had withstood. "Weisburd decides what is 'threatening,'" the authors complained. "He has decided that effective criticism of George Bush, for example, is threatening. He has decided that display of upside-down U.S. flags on websites is threatening. He considers all effective dissent threatening."</p><p dir="ltr">The self-described Victims of Weisburd went on to accuse him and his allies of "hacking into the personal computers of their targets," "getting 'volunteers' inside of web service providers and telecom companies to illegally provide the information," and "report[ing] innocent Americans engaged in legal dissent to federal authorities provoking wasteful investigations which take resources away from the fight against terrorism."</p><p dir="ltr">Evan Kohlmann, another self-styled terror expert who has collaborated with federal authorities, painted Weisburd's tactics as self-defeating. "I understand the sentiment but they are doing damage. They are making these guys stronger," Kohlmann <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/plain-text-heroes-or-nettlesome-hacks-121229">commented</a> to Newsweek, referring to anti-jihadist vigilantes. "They are giving them antibodies."</p><p dir="ltr">A decade after Weisburd was credited for driving hundreds of supposedly extremist sites from the internet, it is unclear what has contributed to the fight against online terrorist enlistment. Today, the internet is filled with an unprecedented number of jihadist websites and recruitment videos that boast eye-popping aesthetic sophistication, and social media is bristling with supporters of Islamist extremism. But as the online jihadisphere expands, so does the bog of national security agencies and private contractors that specialize in transforming geopolitical crises into fantastic profits. For characters like Weisburd, this has meant a wealth of lucrative opportunities.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Murderous fantasies about Greenwald, blacklisting his publication</strong></p><p dir="ltr">By 2011, Weisburd had transformed himself from solo maverick to a respected cybersecurity expert called to testify before Congress. In December of that year, Rep. Patrick Meehan introduced Weisburd to a hearing of the House Committee on Homeland Security as an expert who had overseen "training and briefings to the FBI and CIA" and supposedly authored a textbook "comparing jihadi and street gang videos on YouTube" for the FBI Counterterrorism Division.</p><p dir="ltr">The hearing was dedicated to the danger of online jihadist messaging and was held two months after President Obama authorized the assassination of Al Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki and his 15-year-old son, Abdelrahman, both American citizens. According to a <a href="https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-112hhrg74647/html/CHRG-112hhrg74647.htm">congressional transcript</a>, Weisburd's anti-Muslim Internet Haganah was profusely promoted during the hearing.</p><p>Within three years, after earning a living at the intersection of the counterterror and Islamophobia industries, Weisburd expanded his repertoire to encompass the Russian menace. Once an admirer of Vladimir Putin, whom he bizarrely hailed as a "tough Jew," Weisburd now <a href="https://twitter.com/webradius/status/850484926155804672">mocked</a> the Russian president as a gay "queen" who "will slay you in the outhouse." Weisburd also <a href="https://twitter.com/webradius/status/913545756539260928">speculated</a> that Putin had personally recruited journalist Glenn Greenwald, who is openly gay, as his personal concubine.</p><p dir="ltr">Greenwald had earned international attention when he oversaw the release of confidential National Security Agency files provided to him by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. Published at the Guardian and Intercept, the damning revelations of a Big Brother-style surveillance state sent national security hardliners like Weisburd into a petulant frenzy. On Twitter, Weisburd openly fantasized about the murder of Greenwald, whom he branded as a "<a href="https://twitter.com/webradius/status/441309790333984768">traitor</a>."</p><p dir="ltr">"When Glenn Greenwald accidentally drowns in 2" of water it will not be the slightest bit surprising," Weisburd commented. Upon hearing that Greenwald was set to testify before Congress, he wrote, "I wonder if The Greenwald has lined up a... bodyguard yet for this trip?" (Weisburd has appeared to <a href="https://twitter.com/webradius/status/565320924426428417">fantasize about poisoning</a> Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.) In another instance, Weisburd mocked Greenwald's sexuality and <a href="https://twitter.com/webradius/status/355083653887438850">imagined</a> deploying a "honeytrap" operation to compromise the journalist's integrity.</p><p dir="ltr">Though this sort of blood-curdling banter is hardly unfamiliar in the halls of America's national security state, where even Hillary Clinton was accused by State Department sources of <a href="https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/782906224937410562?lang=en">proposing</a> a drone strike to kill Assange, what made Weisburd's vendetta against Greenwald significant was the way it revealed ASD's Hamilton 68 Dashboard as a de facto political blacklist.</p><p dir="ltr">On September 28, Greenwald published a factual report on how a widely disseminated story alleging that Russian government hacked voting machines in 21 states was debunked. Hours later, Weisburd took to Twitter to <a href="https://twitter.com/webradius/status/913545368582934528">proclaim</a>, "The Kremlin's minions are pushing Greenwald's latest at the Intercept hard tonight. Is it permissible yet to say Glenn is a Kremlin tool?"</p><p dir="ltr">That same day, Weisburd <a href="https://twitter.com/webradius/status/913546991577247744">boasted</a> that ASD had listed the Intercept on its Hamilton 68 Dashboard as a top platform for Kremlin influence. He thus revealed the censorious agenda behind the ASD's methodology. As with the leftist and Islamic-oriented websites Weisburd had targeted for destruction in his halcyon days, he and his colleagues were seeking to suppress outlets that deviated too sharply from the official American line on "Russiagate"—and to punish any journalist that rankled their sensibility.</p><p dir="ltr">Kelsey Glover, the public relations manager of the German Marshall Fund, did not respond to specific questions regarding Weisburd's violent fantasies about Greenwald, or his apparent use of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard as a vehicle to settle scores with the journalist. The George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, where Weisburd is housed as a senior fellow, also did not respond to a list of questions sent by email.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Lobbying for government labeling of media</strong></p><p dir="ltr">The ASD's dashboard is not the first initiative aimed at stamping media organizations with the "Russian influence" label. Soon after Trump's inauguration, a mysterious new group called PropOrNot <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/media/washington-post-promotes-shadowy-website-accuses-200-publications-russian-propaganda-plants">published a blacklist</a> of some 200 American media outlets, branding them all as Russian "online propaganda." Those named by PropOrNot included an array of progressive outlets including Counterpunch, Black Agenda Report, and Truthdig. Among the criteria PropOrNot identified as signs of Russian propaganda were, "Support for policies like Brexit, and the breakup of the EU and Eurozone" and, "Opposition to Ukrainian resistance to Russia and Syrian resistance to Assad." PropOrNot called for "formal investigations by the U.S. government" into the outlets it had blacklisted.</p><p dir="ltr">The Washington Post's Craig Timberg <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html">promoted</a> the flagrantly McCarthyite initiative with a favorable front-page write-up, whitewashing the anonymous figures behind PropOrNot as "a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds"—almost exactly how mainstream reporters have described the ASD's staff. Timberg even quoted Weisburd and cited a post-election report he co-authored with Watts on supposed Russian meddling. (Weisburd has no known role in PropOrNot.)</p><p dir="ltr">The Washington Post's puff piece on PropOrNot was promoted widely by <a href="https://twitter.com/neeratanden/status/801975199021273088">Clintonite dead-enders</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/danpfeiffer/status/802205196516368384">hailed</a> by former Obama White House staffer Dan Pfeiffer as "the biggest story in the world." But the operation swiftly fell apart as a <a href="https://www.truthdig.com/articles/investigation-into-propornot-blacklist-case-finds-shoddy-methods-and-an-ominous-potential/">chorus</a> of progressive journalists exposed the shambolic methods and anti-democratic agenda behind it. An expose of PropOrNot eventually found its way into the pages of the New Yorker, where Adrian Chen <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-propaganda-about-russian-propaganda">branded the group</a> as a propaganda operation in its own right. Ultimately, the Washington Post was compelled to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html?utm_term=.bc7add7fd2e4">append its report</a> with a lengthy editor's note stating, "The Post… does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot's findings regarding any individual media outlet."</p><p dir="ltr">While PropOrNot has faded into obscurity, the ASD is treated by mainstream media as a serious and eminently scientific initiative despite its use of the same shoddy, hyper-politicized methodology. The difference between the two outfits lies primarily in marketing: ASD has publicized the identities of its researchers and flaunted their national security credentials. More importantly, its reputation has been burnished by an elite cast of advisors and the august reputation of the German Marshall Fund.</p><p dir="ltr">But behind both PropOrNot and the ASD lies a censorious agenda that aims to deter news consumers from dissident sources of information. This was made clear when the most prominent figure attached to the ASD, Clint Watts, lobbied Congress to impose a social media rating system of all online media, and with a specific eye on "Russian influence." Citing an op-ed he wrote with Weisburd, Watts called for a "Consumer Reports for news." To counter "Russian disinformation specifically," Watts <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/clint-watts-testimony-russias-info-war-on-the-us-started-in-2014">urged Congress</a> to support a social media rating system. His plan called for news to be given a "score" for accuracy and political "orientation," describing the system as "the equivalent of a nutrition label for information."</p><p dir="ltr">Watts' proposal might have seemed novel, but it was not unprecedented. Back in the early 1990s, as white suburbanites fretted over the impact of rap music on their children, ultra-conservative moral crusader William Bennett and former civil rights leader C. Dolores Tucker <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/01/us/coalition-challenges-time-warner-over-gangsta-rap.html">lobbied Congress</a> to obstruct the sale of gangsta rap. Though Bennett and Tucker failed to realize their most censorious goals, they managed to pressure the music industry to apply labels to music containing explicit content. Sales of rap music continued to skyrocket despite the warning labels, or perhaps because of them.</p><p>The congressional hearings convened this month on Russian social media meddling presented a liberal analog to the conservative freakout over Snoop Dogg and Too Short's lascivious lyrics. Cries for the suppression of "Russian disinformation" reverberated from Capitol Hill, as lawmakers <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-sputnik/lawmakers-want-watchdog-to-probe-russian-radios-propaganda-in-u-s-idUSKCN1BT2O5">called for</a> driving Russian-backed media like RT and Sputnik off American airwaves and <a href="https://www.rt.com/usa/408525-rt-youtube-house-intelligence-social-media/">demanded</a> YouTube ban their material from its platform solely on the basis of its foreign source. The U.S. Department of Justice recently <a href="http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/business-a-lobbying/350226-russian-network-rt-must-register-as-foreign-agent-in">demanded</a> that RT's American bureau register as a foreign agent, an unprecedented request from a credentialed news agency, while pressure from Congress prompted Twitter to <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2017/Announcement-RT-and-Sputnik-Advertising.html">ban advertising</a> from RT.</p><p dir="ltr">To justify its seemingly arbitrary decision, Twitter cited a widely panned <a href="https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf">U.S. intelligence agency report</a> that accused RT of "promoting radical discontent." According to the report, RT's transgressions included "alleg[ing] widespread infringements of civil liberties," hosting a third party presidential candidates' debate, and "opposing Western intervention in the Syrian conflict."</p><p>As the government's crusade against Russian meddling widens, it appears increasingly like a pretext for online surveillance, ramped up securitization of social media and the suppression of dissent. In such a paranoid environment, the labeling of online news with a "nutrition value" may not be far off. Wherever the meltdown leads, Americans can rest assured it will all be justified in the name of preserving our democratic freedoms, while ASD's Watts <a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/10/extremist-content-russian-disinformation-online-working-tech-find-solutions/">calls</a> on the government to "quell information rebellions" with censorious measures imposed from above.</p>
Meet Clint Watts, a Dubious Russia Meddling 'Expert' Lobbying the U.S. Government to 'Quell Information Rebellions'
Nearly a year after the presidential election, the scandal over accusations of Russian political interference in the 2016 election has gone beyond Donald Trump and reached into the nebulous world of online media. On November 1, Congress held hearings on "Extremist Content and Russian Disinformation Online." The proceedings saw executives from Facebook, Twitter and Youtube subjected to tongue-lashings from lawmakers like Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, who howled about Russian online trolls "spread[ing] stories about abuse of black Americans by law enforcement."
<p dir="ltr">In perhaps the most chilling moment of the hearings, and the most overlooked, Clint Watts, a former U.S. Army officer who had branded himself an expert on Russian meddling, <a href="http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/11/01/goog-n01.html">appeared</a> before a nearly empty Senate chamber. Watts conjured up a stark landscape of American carnage, with shadowy Russian operatives stage managing the chaos.</p><p dir="ltr">"Civil wars don't start with gunshots, they start with words," he proclaimed. "America's war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America."</p><p dir="ltr">Next, Watts suggested a government-imposed campaign of media censorship: "Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced: silence the guns and the barrage will end."</p><p dir="ltr">The censorious overtone of Watts' testimony was unmistakable. He demanded that government news inquisitors drive dissident media off the internet and warned that Americans would spear one another with bayonets if they failed to act. And not one member of Congress rose to object. In fact, many echoed his call for media suppression in the House and Senate hearings, with Democrats like Sen. Dianne Feinstein and <a href="https://congressionalblackcaucus.com/propaganda-machine-lawmaker-calls-for-rt-youtube-ban-during-russia-hearing-newsline/">Rep. Jackie Speier</a> agreeing the most vehemently. The spectacle perfectly illustrated the madness of Russiagate, with liberal lawmakers springboarding off the fear of Russian meddling to demand that Americans be forbidden from consuming the wrong kinds of media—including content that amplified the message of progressive causes like Black Lives Matter.</p><p dir="ltr">Details of exactly what transpired vis a vis Russia and the U.S. in social media in 2016 are still emerging. This year, the <a href="https://www.lawfareblog.com/odni-releases-report-assessing-russian-activities-and-intentions-recent-us-elections">Office of the Director of National Intelligence</a> published a declassified version of the intelligence community's report on "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections," written by CIA, FBI and NSA, with its central conclusion that Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow's longstanding desire to undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order." </p><p dir="ltr">To be sure, there is ample evidence that Russian-linked trolls have attempted to exploit wedge issues on social media platforms. But the impact of these schemes on real-world events appears to have been exaggerated. According to <a href="https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/10/hard-questions-russian-ads-delivered-to-congress/">Facebook's data</a>, 56 percent of Russian-linked ads appeared after the 2016 presidential election, and another 25 percent "were never shown to anyone." The ads were said to have "reached" over 100 million people, but that assumes that Facebook users did not scroll through or otherwise ignore them, as they do with most ads. Content emanating from "Russia-linked" sources on YouTube, meanwhile, managed to rack up <a href="https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/917203558986145792">hit totals in the hundreds</a>, not exactly a viral smash.</p><p dir="ltr">Facebook posts traced to the infamous Internet Research Agency troll factory in Russia amounted to only 0.0004 percent of total content that appeared on the social network. (Some of these posts <a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2017/10/04/the-mystery-of-the-russia-gate-puppies/?print=print">targeted "animal lovers</a> with memes of adorable puppies," while another hawked an LGBT-themed "<a href="https://twitter.com/politico/status/925806095221907456">Buff Bernie coloring book</a> for Berniacs.") According to its "<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-russia-facebook-election-accounts-2017-10">deliberately broad" review</a>, Twitter found that only 0.74 percent of its election-related tweets were "Russian-linked." Google, for its part, <a href="https://twitter.com/aparajito_/status/925735221051494401">documented</a> a grand total of $4,700 of "Russian-linked ad spending" during the 2016 election cycle. While some have argued that the Russian-linked ads were micro-targeted, and could have shifted key electoral voting blocs, these ads appeared in a media climate awash in a multi-billion dollar deluge of political ad spending from both established parties and dark money super PACs.</p><p dir="ltr">However, a blitz of feverish corporate media coverage and tension-filled congressional hearings has convinced a whopping <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/22/politics/cnn-poll-facebook-russia/index.html">82 percent of Democrats</a> that "Russian-backed" social media content played a central role in swinging the 2016 election. Russian meddling has even earned <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/325606-democrats-step-up-calls-that-russian-hack-was-act-of-war">comparisons</a> by lawmakers to Pearl Harbor, to "acts of war," and by Hillary Clinton to the <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/clinton-compares-russian-interference-election-911-685474">attacks of 9/11</a>. And in an inadvertent way, these overblown comparisons were apt.</p><p dir="ltr">As during the aftermath of 9/11, the fallout from Russiagate has spawned a multimillion-dollar industry of pundits and self-styled experts eager to exploit the frenetic atmosphere for publicity and profits. Many of these figures have emerged out of the swamp that flowed from the war on terror and are gravitating toward the growing Russia fearmongering industrial complex in search of new opportunities. Few of these characters have become as prominent as Clint Watts.</p><p dir="ltr">So who is Watts, and how did he emerge seemingly from nowhere to become the star congressional witness on Russian meddling?</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Dubious expertise, impressive salesmanship</b></p><p dir="ltr">A former U.S. Army officer who spent years in obscurity at a defense industry funded think tank called the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), Watts has become a go-to source for cable news producers and print journalists on the subject of Russian bots, always available with a comment that reinforces the sense that America is under sustained cyborg attack. This September, his employers at FPRI <a href="https://www.fpri.org/news/2017/09/fpris-clint-watts-recognized-leading-voice-russian-influence-2016-election-beyond/">hailed him</a> as "the leading expert on developments related to Russian-backed efforts to not only influence the 2016 presidential election, but also to inflame racial and cultural divisions within the U.S. and across Europe."</p><p dir="ltr">Watts boasts an impressive-looking bio that is replete with fancy sounding fellowships at national security-oriented outfits, including George Washington University's Center Cyber and Homeland Security. His bio also indicates that he served on an FBI Joint Terror Task Force. </p><p dir="ltr">Though Watts is best known for his punditry on Russian interference, it's fair to say he is as much an expert on Russian affairs as Harvey Weinstein is a trusted voice on feminism. Indeed, Watts appears to speak no Russian, has no record of reporting or scholarship from inside Russia, and has produced little to no work of any discernible academic value on Russian affairs.</p><p dir="ltr">Whether or not he has the substance to support his claims of expertise, Watts has proven a talented salesman, catering to popular fears about Russian interference while he plies credulous lawmakers with ease.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Before Congress, a string of deceptions</strong></p><p dir="ltr">Back on March 30, as the narrative of Russian meddling gathered momentum, Watts made his first appearance before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.</p><p dir="ltr">Seated at the front of a hearing room packed with reporters, Watts introduced Congress to concepts of Russian meddling that were novel at the time, but which have become part of Beltway newspeak. His testimony turned out to be a signal moment in Russiagate, helping transition the narrative of the scandal from Russia-Trump collusion to the wider issue of online influence.</p><p dir="ltr">In the widely publicized testimony, Watts explained to the panel of senators that he first noticed the pernicious presence of Russian social media bots after he co-authored an article in 2014 in Foreign Affairs titled, "<a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/syria/2014-01-23/good-and-bad-ahrar-al-sham">The Good and The Bad of Ahrar al Sham</a>." The article urged the US to arm a group of Syrian Salafi insurgents known for its <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/07/syria-abductions-torture-and-summary-killings-at-the-hands-of-armed-groups/">human rights abuses</a>, sectarianism and <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/grayzone-project/tahrir-al-sham-qaeda-syria-rebels-us-armed-zinki">off-and-on alliances</a> with Al Qaeda. Watts and his co-authors insisted that Ahrar al-Sham was the best proxy force for wreaking havoc on the Syrian government weakening its allies in Iran and Russia. Right below the headline, Watts and his co-authors celebrated Ahrar al-Sham as "an Al Qaeda linked group worth befriending."</p><p dir="ltr">Watts rehashed the same argument at FPRI a year later, <a href="https://www.fpri.org/2015/10/russia-returns-as-al-qaeda-and-the-islamic-states-far-enemy/">urging</a> the U.S. government to harness jihadist terror as a weapon against Russia. "The U.S. at a minimum, through covert or semi-covert platforms, should take advantage and amplify these free alternative [jihadist] narratives to provide Russia some payback for recent years' aggression," he wrote. In another paper, Watts <a href="https://www.fpri.org/2014/05/how-does-the-u-s-counter-al-qaeda-while-al-qaeda-fights-itself/">asked</a>, "Why shouldn't the U.S. redirect some of the jihadi hatred towards those with the dirtiest hands in the Syrian conflict: Russia and Iran?" Watts did not specify whether the theater of covert warfare should be limited to the Syrian battlefield, or if he sought to encourage jihadists to carry out terrorist acts inside Russia and Iran.</p><p dir="ltr">The premise of these op-eds should have raised serious concerns about Watts and his colleagues, and even questions about their sanity. They had marketed themselves as national security experts, yet they were lobbying the US to "befriend" the allies of Al Qaeda, the group that brought down the Twin Towers. (Ahrar al-Sham was founded by Abu Khalid al-Suri, a Madrid bombing suspect who was <a href="https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2013/12/aq_courier_rebel_leader_zawahiri.php">named</a> by Spanish investigators as Osama bin-Laden's courier.) Anyone cynical enough to put such ideas into public circulation should have expected a backlash. But when the inevitable wave of criticism came, Watts dismissed it all as a Russian bot attack.</p><p dir="ltr">Addressing the Senate panel, Watts said that those who took to social media to mock and criticize his Foreign Affairs article were, in fact, Russian bots. He provided no evidence to support the claim, and <a href="https://twitter.com/selectedwisdom/status/426732390988668928">a look</a> at his single tweet promoting the article shows that he was criticized only once (by @Navsteva, a Twitter user known for defending the Syrian government against regime change proponents, not an automated bot). Nevertheless, Watts painted the incident as proof that Russia had revived a Cold War information warfare strategy of "Active Measures," which was supposedly aimed at "crumbl[ing] democracies from the inside out [by] creating political divisions."</p><p dir="ltr">Next, Watts introduced his signature theme, claiming that Russia manipulated civil rights protests to exploit divisions in American society. Declaring that "pro-Russian" outlets were spreading "chaos in Black Lives Matter protests" by deploying active measures, Watts did not bother to say what those measures were. In fact, the only piece of proof he offered (in a Daily Beast transcript of his testimony) was a <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/clint-watts-testimony-russias-info-war-on-the-us-started-in-2014">single link</a> to an <a href="https://www.rt.com/usa/361346-blm-wlm-protests-houston/">RT article</a> that factually documented a squabble between Black Lives Matter protesters and white supremacists—an incident that had been widely covered by other outlets, from the <a href="http://www.chron.com/houston/article/White-Lives-Matter-group-protests-outside-NAACP-9176142.php">Houston Chronicle</a> to the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/08/22/armed-confederate-flag-waving-white-lives-matter-protesters-rally-outside-houston-naacp/">Washington Post</a>. Watts did not explain how this one report by RT sowed any chaos, or whether it had any effect at all on actual events.</p><p dir="ltr">Watts then moved to the main course of his testimony, focusing on how Trump employed Russian "active measures" to attack his opponents. Watts told the Senate panel that the Russian-backed news outlets RT and Sputnik had produced a false report on the U.S. airbase in Incirlik, Turkey being "overrun by terrorists." He presented the Russian stories as the anchor for a massive influence operation that featured swarms of Russian bots across social media. And he claimed that then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort invoked the incident to deflect from negative media coverage, suggesting that Trump was coordinating strategy with the Kremlin. In reality, it was Watts who was spreading the fake news.</p><p>In the articles <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-russia-dominates-your-twitter-feed-to-promote-lies-and-trump-too">cited by</a> Watts during his testimony, neither <a href="https://www.rt.com/news/354042-turkish-police-incirlik-nato-coup/">RT</a> nor <a href="https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201607311043797161-incirlik-turkey-erdogan-nato-nukes/">Sputnik</a> made any reference to "terrorists" taking over Incirlik Airbase. Rather, these outlets compiled tweets by Turkish activists and sourced their coverage to a report by Hurriyet, one of Turkey's largest mainstream papers. In fact, the incident was reported by virtually every major Turkish news organization (<a href="http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/incirlik-ussune-giris-cikislar-yasaklandi-40176636">here</a>, <a href="http://www.haberturk.tv/gundem/haber/1274495-incirlik-ussunde-ohal">here</a>, <a href="http://www.yeniyon24.com/incirlik-ussune-giris-cikislar-yasaklandi/">here</a> and <a href="http://gazetemanifesto.com/2016/07/31/incirlik-ussune-giris-cikislar-yasaklandi/">here</a>). What's more, the events appeared to have taken place approximately as RT and Sputnik reported it, with protesters readying to protect the airbase from a coup while Turkish police sealed the base's entrances and exits. A look at RT's coverage shows the network even downplayed the severity of the event, <a href="https://twitter.com/DEFCONWSALERTS/status/759527790395949056?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fnews%2F354042-turkish-police-incirlik-nato-coup%2F">citing a tweet</a> by a U.S.-based national security analysis group stating, "We are not finding any evidence of a coup or takeover." This stands entirely at odds with Watts' claim that RT exaggerated the incident to spark chaos.</p><p dir="ltr">Watts has pushed his bogus narrative of RT and Sputnik's Incirlik coverage in numerous outlets, including <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/how-russia-wins-an-election-214524">Politico</a>. Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen <a href="https://the-constituent.com/executive-session-by-senator-jeanne-shaheen/speech/86400">echoed</a> Watts' false account on the Senate floor while arguing for legislation to force RT out of the U.S. market on political grounds. And Jim Rutenberg, the New York Times' media correspondent, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/magazine/rt-sputnik-and-russias-new-theory-of-war.html">reproduced</a> Watts' distorted account in a major feature on RT and Sputnik's "new theory of war." Almost no one, not one major media organization or public figure, has bothered to fact check these false claims, and few have questioned the agenda behind them.</p><p dir="ltr">Questions emailed to Watts via his employers at FPRI received no reply.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Another Watts deception, this time discredited in court</strong></p><p dir="ltr">During his Senate testimony, Watts introduced a second, and even more distorted claim of Trump employing Russian "active measures" to attack his political foes. The details of the story are complex and difficult for a passive audience to absorb, which is probably why Watts has been able to get away with pushing it for so long.</p><p dir="ltr">Watts' testimony was the culmination of a mainstream media deception that forced an aspiring reporter out of his job, drove him to contemplate suicide, and ultimately prompted him to take matters into his own hands by suing his antagonists.</p><p dir="ltr">The episode began during a Trump rally at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign, when Trump read out an email purportedly from longtime Hillary Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal (the father of this writer), hoping to embarrass Clinton over Benghazi. The text of the email turned out to be part of a column written by the pro-Clinton Newsweek columnist Kurt Eichenwald, not an email by Blumenthal.</p><p dir="ltr">The source of Trump's falsehood appeared to have been a report by Bill Moran, then a reporter for Sputnik, the news service funded by the Russian government. Having confused Eichenwald's writing for a Blumenthal email, Moran <a href="https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/07/after-a-nasty-battle-kurt-eichenwald-settles-with.html">scrubbed his erroneous article</a> within 20 minutes. Somehow, Moran's retracted article had found its way onto the Trump campaign's radar, a not atypical event for a campaign that had relied on material from far-out sites like Infowars to undercut its opponents.</p><p dir="ltr">In his column at Newsweek, Eichenwald framed Moran's honest mistake as the leading edge of a secret Russian influence operation. With help from pro-Clinton elements, Eichenwald's column went viral, earning him slots on CNN and MSNBC, where he howled about the nefarious Russian-Trump-Wikileaks plot he believed he had just exposed. (Glenn Greenwald was perhaps the only reporter with a national platform to <a href="https://theintercept.com/2016/10/11/in-the-democratic-echo-chamber-inconvenient-truths-are-recast-as-putin-plots/">highlight Eichenwald's falsifications</a>.) Moran was fired as a result of the fallout, and would have to spend the next several months fighting to correct the record.</p><p dir="ltr">When Moran appealed to Eichenwald for a public clarification, Eichenwald staunchly refused. Instead, he <a href="https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/07/after-a-nasty-battle-kurt-eichenwald-settles-with.html">offered Moran a job</a> at the New Republic in exchange for his silence and warned him, "If you go public, you'll regret it." (Eichenwald had no role at the New Republic or any clear ability to influence the magazine's hiring decisions.) Moran refused to cooperate, prompting Eichenwald to publish a follow-up piece painting himself as the victim of a Russian "active measures" campaign, and to cast Moran once again as a foreign agent.</p><p dir="ltr">When Watts revived Eichenwald's bogus version of events in his Senate testimony, Moran began to spiral into the depths of depression. He even entertained thoughts of suicide. But he ultimately decided to fight, filing a lawsuit against Newsweek's parent company for defamation and libel.</p><p dir="ltr">Representing himself in court, Moran elicited a settlement from Newsweek that forced the magazine to scrub all of Eichenwald's articles about him—a tacit admission that they were false from top to bottom. This meant that the most consequential claim Watts made before the Senate was also a whopping lie.</p><p dir="ltr">The day after Watts' deception-laden appearance, he was nevertheless transformed from an obscure national security into a cable news star, with <a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/04/fpri-fellow-clint-watts-testimony-senate-intelligence-committee/">invites</a> from Morning Joe, Rachel Maddow, Meet the Press, and the liberal comedian Samantha Bee, among many others. His testimony received coverage from the gamut of major news outlets, and even earned him a fawning profile from CNN. From out of the blue, Watts had become the star witness of Russiagate, and one of corporate media's favorite pundits.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>FPRI, a pro-war think tank founded by white supremacist eugenicists</strong></p><p dir="ltr">Before he emerged in the spotlight of Russiagate, Watts languished at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, earning little name recognition outside the insular world of national security pundits. Based in Philadelphia, the FPRI has been <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/media/anonymous-blacklist-promoted-washington-post-has-shocking-roots-ukrainian-fascism-eugenics-and">described</a> by journalist Mark Ames as "one of the looniest (and spookiest) extreme-right think tanks since the early Cold War days, promoting 'winnable' nuclear war, maximum confrontation with Russia, and attacking anti-colonialism as dangerously unworkable."</p><p dir="ltr">Daniel Pipes, the arch-Islamophobe pundit and former FPRI fellow, offered a <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/978/from-a-distance-influencing-foreign-policy-from-philadelphia">similar characterization</a> of the think tank, albeit from an alternately opposed angle. "Put most baldly, we have always advocated an activist U.S. foreign policy," Pipes said in a 1991 address to FPRI. He added that the think tank's staff "is not shy about the use of force; were we members of Congress in January 1991, all of us would not only have voted with President Bush and Operation Desert Storm, we would have led the charge."</p><p dir="ltr">FPRI was co-founded by Robert Strausz-Hupé, a far-right Austrian emigre, with help from conservative corporations and covert funding from the CIA. From the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, Strausz-Hupé gathered a "Philadelphia School" of Cold War hardliners to develop a strategy for protracted war against the Soviet Union. His brain trust included FPRI co-founder Stefan Possony, an Austrian fascist who was a board member of the World Anti-Communist League, the international fascist organization <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/chip-berlet/mccain-advised-ultra-righ_b_132612.html">described</a> by journalists Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson as a network of "those responsible for death squads, apartheid, torture, and the extermination of European Jewry." True to his fascist roots, Possony co-authored a racialist tract, "<a href="http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3396&amp;context=uclrev">The Geography of Intellect</a>," that argued that blacks were biologically inferior and that the people of the global South were "genetically unpromising." Strausz-Hupé seized on Possony's racialist theories to inveigh against anti-colonial movements led by "populations incapable of rational thought."</p><p dir="ltr">While clamoring for a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union—and acknowledging that their preferred strategy would cause mass casualties in American cities—Strausz-Hupé and his band of hawks developed a monomaniacal obsession with Russian propaganda. By the time of the Cuban missile crisis, they were stricken with paranoia, arguing on the pages of the New York Times that filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was a Soviet useful idiot whose film, <em>Dr. Strangelove</em>, advanced "the principal Communist objectives to drive a wedge between the American people and their military leaders."</p><p>Ultimately, Strausz-Hupé's fanaticism cost him an ambassadorship, as Sen. William Fulbright scuttled his appointment to serve in Morocco on the grounds that his "hard line, no compromise" approach to communism could shatter the delicate balance of diplomacy. Today, he is <a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/1999/03/the-wisdom-of-robert-strausz-hupe/">remembered fondly</a> on FPRI's website as "an intellectual and intellectual impresario, administrator, statesman, and visionary." His militaristic legacy continues thanks to the prolific presence—and bellicose politics—of Watts.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>The paranoid style</strong></p><p dir="ltr">This year, FPRI dedicated its annual gala to honoring Watts' success in mainstreaming the narrative of Russian online meddling. Since I first transcribed a Soundcloud recording of Watts' keynote address, the file has been <a href="https://soundcloud.com/fpri-philadelphia/fake-news-and-russian-information-operations">mysteriously scrubbed</a> from the internet. It is unclear what prompted the removal, however, it is easy to understand why Watts would not want his comments examined by a critical listener. His speech offered a window into a paranoid mindset with a tendency for overblown, unverifiable claims about Russian influence.</p><p dir="ltr">While much of the speech was a rehash of Watts' Senate testimony, he spent an unusual amount of time describing the threat he believed Russian intelligence agents posed to his own security. "If you speak up too much, you'll get knocked down," Watts said, claiming that think tank fellows who had been too vocal about Russian meddling had seen their laptops "burned up by malware."</p><p dir="ltr">"If someone rises up in prominence, they will suddenly be—whoof!—swiped down out of nowhere by some crazy disclosure from their email," Watts added, referring to unspecified Russian retaliatory measures. As usual, he didn't produce concrete evidence or offer any examples.</p><p dir="ltr">"Anybody remember the reporters that were outed after the election? Or maybe they tossed up a question to the Clinton campaign and they were gone the next day?" he asked his audience. "That's how it goes."</p><p dir="ltr">It was unclear which reporters Watts was referring to, or what incident he could have possibly been alluding to. He offered no details, only innuendo about the state of siege Kremlin actors had supposedly imposed on him and his freedom-fighting colleagues. He even predicted he'd be "hacked and cyber attacked when this recording comes out."</p><p dir="ltr">According to Watts, Russian "active measures" had singlehandedly augmented Republican opinion in support of the Kremlin. "It is the greatest success in influence operations in the history of the world," Watts confidently proclaimed. He contrasted Russia's success with his own failures as an American agent of influence working for the U.S. military, a saga in his career that remains largely unexamined.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Domestic agent of influence</strong></p><p dir="ltr">"I worked in influence operations in counter-terrorism for 15 years," Watts boasted to his audience at FPRI. "We didn't break one or two percent [increase in the approval rating of US foreign policy] in fifteen years and we spent billions a year in tax dollars doing it. I was paid off of those programs. We had almost no success throughout the Middle East."</p><p dir="ltr">By Watts' own admission, he had been part of a secret propaganda campaign aimed at manipulating the opinions of Middle Easterners in favor of the hostile American military operating in their midst. And he failed massively, wasting "billions a year in tax dollars."</p><p dir="ltr">Given his penchant for deception, this may have been yet another tall tale aimed at burnishing his image as an internet era James Bond. But if the story was even partially true, Watts had inadvertently exposed a severe scandal that, in a fairer world, might have triggered congressional hearings.</p><p dir="ltr">Whatever took place, it appears that Watts and his Cold Warrior colleagues are now waging another expensive influence operation, this time directed against the American public. By deploying deceptions, half-truths and hyperbole with the full consent of Congress and in collaboration with the mainstream press, they have managed to convince a majority of Americans that Russia is "trying to knock us down and take us over," as Watts remarked at the FPRI's gala.</p><p>In just a matter of months, public consent for an unprecedented array of hostile measures against Russia, from sanctions and <a href="https://www.rt.com/news/402186-russian-consulate-us-raiders/">consular raids</a> to arbitrary <a href="http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/business-a-lobbying/350226-russian-network-rt-must-register-as-foreign-agent-in">crackdowns</a> on Russian-backed news organizations, has been assiduously manufactured.</p><p dir="ltr">It was not until this summer, however, that the influence operation Watts helped establish reached critical capacity. He had <a href="http://www.businessinsider.fr/us/russian-propaganda-website-tracker-2017-8/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;%3Butm_medium=referral&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+businessinsider+%28Business+Insider%29">approached</a> one of Washington's most respected think tanks, the German Marshall Fund, and secured support for an initiative called the Alliance for Securing Democracy. The new initiative became responsible for a daily blacklist of subversive, "pro-Russian" media outlets, targeting them with the backing of a who's who of national security honchos, from Bill Kristol to former CIA director and ex-Hillary Clinton surrogate Michael Morrell, along with favorable promotion from some of the country's most respected news organizations.</p><p dir="ltr">In the next installment of this investigation, we will see how a collection of cranks, counter-terror retreads and online vigilantes overseen by the German Marshall Fund have waged a search-and-destroy mission against dissident media under the guise of combatting Russian "active measures," and how the mainstream press has enabled their censorious agenda.</p><p dir="ltr">Read part two <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/grayzone-project/terror-cranks-sold-america-russia-panic">here.</a></p>
How 'Russian' Facebook Memes Expose the Brutal Realities of American Foreign Policy
This month, American corporate media outlets have been whipped into a frenzy by revelations that a Russian internet troll farm purchased ads and established accounts on Facebook. According to the New York Times a "shadowy Russian company" supposedly "linked to" the Kremlin has spread "misinformation" on social media in order "to reshape American politics."
<p dir="ltr">The ads allegedly contained messages promoting a wide array of hot button political issues, from police brutality and Islamophobia to gun rights. Some also contained images of adorable puppies. Congressional investigators have alleged that the ad campaign evidenced the Kremlin's intention to "sow chaos" and "promote racial division," claims that have been faithfully reproduced in corporate outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post.</p><p dir="ltr">An article in the Daily Beast took the narrative a step further, asserting that the ads and memes spread on supposedly Russian troll accounts on Facebook were actually "fake news"—meaning that their content was objectively false, and was designed to deceive Americans into turning against their government's otherwise benevolent foreign policy goals.</p><p dir="ltr">The article in question, "<a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-russians-impersonated-real-american-muslims-to-stir-chaos-on-facebook-and-instagram">Russians Impersonated Real American Muslims to Stir Chaos on Facebook and Instagram</a>," claimed that a moderately popular Facebook page called United Muslims of America was in fact an "imposter account" that was "traced back to the Russian government."</p><p dir="ltr">According to the Daily Beast's Spencer Ackerman, Ben Collins and Kevin Poulsen, an allegedly Russian group "stirred chaos" by sharing memes on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The reporters also claimed these dastardly memes took "a sharp detour into fake news."</p><p dir="ltr">While many of the memes highlighted by the Daily Beast were hyperbolic, as Facebook memes tend to be, their content was far from "fake news." In fact, they hammered on some of the most uncomfortable realities and inconvenient truths of American foreign policy, particularly the CIA's covert support for Islamist insurgents from Afghanistan to Syria and how this policy fueled the rise of Al Qaeda and ISIS.</p><p dir="ltr">Through whitewashing and outright denial of the well-documented history of U.S. covert operations in the Middle East, the Daily Beast's reporters engaged in the very thing they were accusing Russian trolls of spreading: propaganda and fake news. The false claims are examined in detail below, along with the painful historical realities that Ackerman and his co-authors aimed to obscure.</p><p dir="ltr">Among the most egregious falsehoods they advanced related to recorded testimony delivered to Congress by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Hillary Clinton acknowledging U.S. role in fueling al-Qaeda</strong></p><p dir="ltr">Collins, Poulsen and Ackerman highlighted several Facebook posts by alleged Russian trolls that they claimed were rife with falsehoods. A closer look shows that most were grounded in established fact, or at least contained elements of truth. A prominent example is an April 2016 video published by the United Muslims of America page, featuring Hillary Clinton detailing the U.S. role in creating extremist groups like al-Qaeda. The Facebook page said, "#Hillary #Clinton admits #America created, funded and armed Al Qaeda ISIS terrorists…but everybody is still blaming Muslims?"</p><p dir="ltr">"America did none of those things," the Daily Beast insisted, and Hillary Clinton "never claimed it had."</p><p dir="ltr">The Daily Beast failed to mention that the video cited by United Muslims of America does indeed exist. Those who watch it for themselves can see Clinton explicitly acknowledging the leading U.S. role in fueling the spread of Salafi-jihadist groups.</p><p dir="ltr">YouTube user Amir Parvez uploaded what appears to be the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsIp1TDwFLs">video</a> cited by United Muslims of America, and using the same title, "Hillary Clinton admits America created, funded and armed Al Qaeda / ISIS terrorists," in October 2016. The video consists of two separate clips of Clinton.</p><p dir="ltr">The first is a July 2010 interview the Secretary of State conducted with Fox News' Greta Van Susteren. A transcript of this interview is <a href="https://2009-2017.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2010/07/144969.htm">archived</a> at the U.S. State Department website. In this video, Clinton can be seen clearly saying, "The United States had—to be fair, we had helped to create the problem we're now fighting."</p><p dir="ltr">Clinton continues: "When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, we had this brilliant idea that we were going to come to Pakistan and create a force of mujaheddin, equip them with Stinger missiles and everything else, to go after the Soviets inside Afghanistan. And we were successful. The Soviets left Afghanistan."</p><p dir="ltr">She goes on: "And then we said great, goodbye—leaving these trained people who were fanatical in Afghanistan and Pakistan, leaving them well armed, creating a mess, frankly, that at the time we didn't really recognize. We were just so happy to see the Soviet Union fall and we thought, okay, fine, we're okay now, everything's going to be so much better. Now you look back; the people we're fighting today we were supporting in the fight against the Soviets."</p><p dir="ltr">The second clip is from Secretary Clinton's April 2009 <a href="https://www.dawn.com/news/847153">appearance</a> before the House Appropriations Committee. In this address, she states, "Let's remember here, the people we are fighting today, we funded 20 years ago. And we did it because we were locked in the struggle with the Soviet Union. They invaded Afghanistan and we did not want to see them control central Asia. And we went to work."</p><p dir="ltr">Clinton's comments were reported on at the time by <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0904/24/ltm.01.html">CNN</a>: "And it was President Reagan in partnership with the Congress led by Democrats who said, you know what? Sounds like a pretty good idea. Let's deal with the ISI and the Pakistani military and let's go recruit these Mujahideen. And that's great. Let's get some to come from Saudi Arabia and other places importing their Wahhabi brand of Islam so that we can go beat the Soviet Union."</p><p dir="ltr">She went on: "And guess what? They retreated. They lost billions of dollars and it led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. So there is a very strong argument which is it wasn't a bad investment to end the Soviet Union, but let's be careful what we sow because we will harvest."</p><p>In these remarks, Hillary Clinton was acknowledging an undeniable historical fact: al-Qaeda and the Taliban emerged out of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s.</p><p dir="ltr">Clinton was not referring to ISIS in these video clips, as the extremist group did not yet exist. In this sense, the United Muslims of America Facebook post exaggerated Clinton's remarks. But the core of the account's claim rests on a foundation of truth.</p><p>This first glaring falsehood deployed by the Daily Beast flowed effortlessly into the next, with each ahistorical claim advanced under the guise of battling fake news.</p><p>[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_original","fid":"627331","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"833","style":"width: 600px; height: 338px;","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"1480"}}]]</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>U.S. support for jihadist groups in Syria: Another case of Daily Beast denialism</strong></p><p dir="ltr">The Daily Beast noted that other memes posted on the United Muslims of America page accused the U.S., and particularly neoconservative Senator John McCain, of supporting ISIS. Collins, Poulsen and Ackerman described these claims as "disinformation," but left out some critical context.</p><p dir="ltr">There is no publicly available evidence that the U.S. intentionally directly supported ISIS, but it is undeniable that U.S. government policies for years strengthened ISIS, and that the U.S. was aware of this and continued these policies anyway.</p><p dir="ltr">ISIS grew out of al-Qaeda, which in turn has its origins in Operation Cyclone, the CIA's covert program in Afghanistan that was referenced by Hillary Clinton in the testimony she delivered to Congress as Secretary of State. It is now widely conceded by experts that ISIS' predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), greatly benefited from the illegal 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which destroyed the Iraqi state, and the subsequent U.S. arming and training of rebels in Syria after 2011.</p><p dir="ltr">A declassified Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) <a href="https://levantreport.com/2015/05/19/2012-defense-intelligence-agency-document-west-will-facilitate-rise-of-islamic-state-in-order-to-isolate-the-syrian-regime/">document</a> provides indisputable evidence that in August 2012, the U.S. government knew that "the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria." It added that "AQI supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media."</p><p>The DIA document even predicted the rise of ISIS, noting that "there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime… ISI could also declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria."</p><p dir="ltr">This is precisely what happened: ISI, the Islamic State in Iraq, merged with al-Qaeda in Syria and created a so-called caliphate around the area of Deir al-Zour, just as the U.S. government had predicted.</p><p dir="ltr">Despite the U.S. government's clear knowledge that ISIS' predecessors were "the major forces" in the Syrian armed opposition, the U.S. and its proxies Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey flooded country with billions of dollars of weapons and support.</p><p dir="ltr">The CIA expended massive resources, in the largest covert operation since the war in Afghanistan that gave birth to al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the 1980s, arming and training militants in Syria, some of whom later defected to extremist groups like ISIS and the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra. (Al-Nusra was initially allied with the Islamic State group, but eventually the two became enemies.)</p><p>Moreover, a leaked <a href="https://www.salon.com/2016/10/11/leaked-hillary-clinton-emails-show-u-s-allies-saudi-arabia-and-qatar-supported-isis/">August 2014 email</a> from Hillary Clinton cited "U.S. intelligence" and stated very clearly that U.S. proxies Saudi Arabia and Qatar "are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region."</p><p dir="ltr">Former vice president Joe Biden similarly acknowledged this fact in a 2014 <a href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/10/07/joe-biden-is-the-only-honest-man-in-washington/">talk</a> at Harvard University. He noted that close U.S. allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia "were so determined to take down" Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that "they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra, and al Qaeda, and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world."</p><p dir="ltr">While it is hyperbolic to say the U.S. directly created and supported ISIS, it is irrefutable that U.S. policy helped produce the extremist group and fueled its advance for years. These facts might make the staunchly neoconservative editors at the Daily Beast uncomfortable, especially given their investment in advancing the discredited narrative of the Syrian armed opposition.</p><p dir="ltr">For his part, John McCain was a staunch supporter of the armed Syrian opposition and a leading cheerleader for the wars of regime change and covert operations that led to ISIS' rise. McCain even traveled illegally to Syria to meet with and encourage members of its Islamist-led armed opposition, posing for a photo with two insurgents who had been involved in kidnapping Shia pilgrims.</p><p dir="ltr">While it is not true that McCain founded ISIS, he strongly contributed to its growth and personally cheered on the Islamist insurgents who served as jihadist backfill, partnering with ISIS and Al Qaeda in numerous guerilla operations against the Syrian government.</p><p dir="ltr">It is also indisputably true, as one of the Russian troll memes claimed, that the U.S. has bombed the Syrian government while battling ISIS. The most extreme example was a September 2016 incident in which the U.S. attacked Syrian army forces for an hour as they were fighting ISIS.</p><p dir="ltr">The U.S. claimed the attack, which killed around 100 Syrian troops and helped ISIS seize territory around Deir al-Zour airport, was a mistake. The Syrian army <a href="https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/us-coalition-knew-bombing-syrian-army-deir-ezzor/">insisted otherwise</a>. This U.S. attack sabotaged a ceasefire that had been agreed to after months of negotiations.</p><p dir="ltr">This August, the Syrian army liberated Deir al-Zour from ISIS after years of crushing siege, and had already driven ISIS from the city of Palmyra. According to the Daily Beast's Ackerman and his co-authors, however, to simply acknowledge this documented history is to advance "Russia's and Assad's preferred framing."</p><p dir="ltr">By characterizing historical facts as dangerous narratives that benefit enemies abroad, the Daily Beast's authors engaged in a classic practice of nationalistic propaganda—the very same one they accused the Russians of deploying.</p><p dir="ltr">But they weren't finished; next, Ackerman and his colleagues flatly denied the American role in the rise of Osama bin Laden.</p><p><strong>Osama bin Laden's CIA ties</strong></p><p dir="ltr">In response to another United Muslims of America meme claiming al-Qaeda co-founder "Osama bin Laden was a CIA agent," the Daily Beast insisted with scarcely any explanation that "bin Laden was neither a CIA agent nor a CIA asset during his time in the 1980s fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan."</p><p dir="ltr">The reality of bin Laden's relationship to the U.S. is much more complex, but it is well documented. In a news story published in 1998 — three years before the 9/11 attacks — MSNBC noted that the al-Qaeda mastermind indeed had "CIA ties" and was the "personification of blowback."</p><p dir="ltr">The MSNBC report by Michael Moran, "<a href="http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1245.htm">Bin Laden comes home to roost</a>," noted that bin Laden ran the front organization Maktab al-Khidamar (MAK), to arm extremist Islamist rebels in Afghanistan. "What the CIA bio conveniently fails to specify (in its unclassified form, at least) is that the MAK was nurtured by Pakistan's state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA's primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow's occupation," MSNBC reported at the time.</p><p dir="ltr">Moran added, "Bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the 'reliable' partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow."</p><p dir="ltr">British Foreign Secretary <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/jul/08/july7.development">Robin Cook</a> was more blunt, declaring that bin Laden "was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan."</p><p dir="ltr">One of the most notable figures in the annals of jihadism, the "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman, was a key asset of the Afghan warlord -- and bin Laden ally -- who benefited the most handsomely from CIA support: <a href="http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-afghanistan-insurgent-20160515-snap-story.html">Gulbuddin Hekmatyar</a>. As a reward for the services he provided the US, Abdel Rahman was granted a special visa by the CIA, enabling him to take over the the MAK's New York area operations on behalf of bin Laden. He was ultimately convicted of plotting to blow up the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln Tunnel in a prosecution fraught with allegations of entrapment.</p><p dir="ltr">The role of the CIA in approving Abdel Rahman's visas has been widely documented, most prominently by the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1993/07/22/nyregion/cia-officers-played-role-in-sheik-visas.html">New York Times</a>. Surely the Daily Beast's Ackerman, who has branded himself as a national security expert, should have known this history. But he didn't bother to mention it, either because he was ignorant to it, or because it interfered with a simplistic narrative that cast harsh critiques of American foreign policy as "fake news."</p><p>Historians have hotly debated whether or not the U.S. directly armed bin Laden. Pakistani academic Eqbal Ahmad famously <a href="http://www.sangam.org/ANALYSIS/Ahmad.htm">told an audience</a> that he was introduced to bin Laden by a "U.S. official." However intimate bin Laden's relationship with Washington was at the height of the Cold War, to claim, as the Daily Beast did, that he was never a "CIA asset," is misleading at best and propagandistic at worst. It is indisputable that bin Laden and his so-called Arab Mujahideen at the least indirectly benefited from the CIA operation in Afghanistan, and that American covert operations set the stage for the rise of Al Qaeda across the Middle East.</p><p>[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_original","fid":"627334","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"833","style":"width: 600px; height: 338px;","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"1480"}}]]</p><p><strong>The Russian troll meme is true: ISIS did apologize to Israel</strong></p><p dir="ltr">Another meme from the United Muslims of America Facebook page that the Daily Beast's reporters attempted to brand as fake news was a doctored photo of ISIS fighters kneeling below fluttering Israeli flags. The meme poses a question, "Did you know that ISIS apologised to Israel for firing missiles on Israel by mistake?"</p><p dir="ltr">While the image of ISIS cadres flanked by Israeli flags was photoshopped, it does not change the fact that this did happen: ISIS did indeed apologize to Israel.</p><p>Former defense minister <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-defense-minister-says-is-apologized-to-israel-for-november-clash/">Moshe Ya'alon</a> acknowledged in April that ISIS militants in the illegally Israel-occupied Golan Heights "apologized" — his words — after accidentally opening fire on Israeli forces in November 2016.</p><p>This is by no means the Israeli government's first link to extremist groups in Syria. As <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/grayzone-project/conan-obrien-israel-hospitals-syrian-al-qaeda-rebels">AlterNet's Grayzone Project has reported</a>, Israel has had a tacit tactical alliance with al-Qaeda in Syria, treating its fighters in Israeli hospitals and even providing al-Qaeda air cover in its fights against Hezbollah and Syrian government forces.</p><p dir="ltr">The Daily Beast featured a photo of the meme shown above, but did not bother to debunk its core claim. And that's likely because the claim is true, and deeply uncomfortable for supporters of Israel to acknowledge.</p><p dir="ltr">[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_original","fid":"627336","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"833","style":"width: 600px; height: 338px;","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"1480"}}]]</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Daily Beast propaganda versus the reality of Muammar Gaddafi's Libya</strong></p><p dir="ltr">The Daily Beast also referred to former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who was killed in a 2011 NATO-led war, as a "blood-drenched dictator," and claimed one of the memes posted by the United Muslims of America Facebook page "whitewashed" him.</p><p dir="ltr">The meme in question noted that, before NATO destroyed Libya's government and turned the oil-rich North African nation into a failed state, all Libyans had healthcare, electricity, education, housing and other social services guaranteed to them by their government. The Daily Beast implies this is false, but it is an undeniable fact that was recently echoed by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/a-reporters-journey-through-tripoli-long-lines-kidnappings-and-murder/2017/08/01/3e64031b-1040-4571-b218-9bc2c4a5436d_story.html">the Washington Post</a>.</p><p dir="ltr">Since the catastrophic NATO regime change operation, Libya has become a haven for extremist groups like ISIS. Untold numbers of refugees have fled for their lives, driving a migration crisis in Europe that has <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/austria-election-results-sebastian-kurz-freedom-party-austrian-peoples-party-racism-a8005071.html">fueled the rise</a> of extreme right parties, and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/10/libya-public-slave-auctions-un-migration">open-air slave markets</a> can now be found in NATO-"liberated" Libya.</p><p dir="ltr">The meme posted by the United Muslims of America Facebook page was first created by the conspiracy theory website Connecting Consciousness, and references an absurd and borderline anti-Semitic conspiracy theory implying that Gaddafi was overthrown because his country did not have a "Rothschild-owned central bank." The other aspects of the meme are essentially correct, however.</p><p dir="ltr">While Western corporate media outlets and governments level allegations of fake news at Russian troll farms, they have yet to correct the fake news they spread during the 2011 NATO-led war in Libya—baseless lies like then-UN Ambassador <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/29/diplomat-gaddafi-troops-viagra-mass-rape">Susan Rice's claim</a> that Gaddafi had distributed Viagra to his troops to carry out mass rape in Benghazi. Despite its humanitarian deceptions, the Libya intervention was always about <a href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/22/libya-and-the-myth-of-humanitarian-intervention/">regime change</a>. A 2016 <a href="https://www.salon.com/2016/09/16/u-k-parliament-report-details-how-natos-2011-war-in-libya-was-based-on-lies/">report by the British House of Commons</a> confirmed that many of the claims used to sell the war, such as the claims that Gaddafi was planning on massacring civilians, were in fact false.</p><p dir="ltr">The Daily Beast was at the forefront of promoting fake news in the service of Libyan regime change, publishing false stories on <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/hague-libya-troops-gang-raping-women">mass rape</a> by <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-envoy-gaddafi-forces-taking-viagra-raping">Viagra-popping</a> Libyan troops, and <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/muammar-gaddafi-and-the-fate-of-libyas-rebellion-in-tripoli-the-daily-beast-reports">giving space</a> to neoconservative charlatans like Bernard Henri-Levy, the French pseudo-philosopher who played a central role in grooming the Libyan opposition, to trumpet the regime change operation as an exercise in "freedom."</p><p>[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_original","fid":"627337","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"833","style":"width: 600px; height: 338px;","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"1480"}}]]</p><p><strong>The Daily Beast implies anti-war views are a Russian plot</strong></p><p>In its falsehood-laden article, the Daily Beast highlighted anti-war memes posted by the United Muslims of America Facebook page. Among those included were memes reading, "No to military intervention in Syria!" and "Stop bombing the Syrians who are really fighting ISIS!"</p><p dir="ltr">In doing so, Ben Collins, Kevin Poulsen and Spencer Ackerman essentially implied that opposition to U.S. wars of regime and foreign military intervention plays into the hands of the Kremlin, and is therefore anti-American.</p><p dir="ltr">The reporters noted that the alleged Russian Instagram account used the hashtag #StopBombingSyria more than 30 times, and advocated for "the U.S. military to stay out of Syria."</p><p dir="ltr">They also took extreme umbrage at a meme that pointed out that the $93 million tax dollars worth of missiles that the U.S. fired at a Syrian airfield in April—which <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/grayzone-project/isis-us-attack-syria-sharyat-air-base-homs">effectively helped ISIS</a>—could have instead been used to fund the social program Meals on Wheels until 2029."</p><p dir="ltr">The conclusion readers are supposed to draw is clear: those who oppose disastrous U.S. wars abroad are, wittingly or not, part of a sinister Kremlin plot.</p><p>[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_original","fid":"627339","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"640","style":"width: 600px; height: 600px;","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"640"}}]]</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>The Daily Beast ignores the majority of 'United Muslims of America' posts</strong></p><p dir="ltr">The Daily Beast's narrative— that the nefarious Russian puppet master spread memes on social media to poison the minds of the American people—is further discredited by an examination of the <a href="https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipMCQ6Thu-YPC8dQWefzI68N5h-M7QKvxIOHWHHkr7oV1LgRzxsLFjuSuCIRpAYMsg?key=VUFFWjNFRUVpbm9iU2c4eGdhTHRKbWxIZ1VUTUpB">archive</a> of material the United Muslims of America account posted.</p><p dir="ltr">The vast majority of the memes published by the account were devoted to countering Islamophobia, xenophobia and bigoted myths. Some social media posts were even staunchly pro-Hillary Clinton. Yet Collins, Poulsen and Ackerman selected a small handful of memes to prove a point, while ignoring the rest. Thus, they engaged in another propaganda tactic that they accused Russian trolls of.</p><p dir="ltr">A full review of the Facebook page's posts would have revealed that the majority were innocuous and meant to encourage religious tolerance. One of its most popular posts, a <a href="http://archive.is/1eXmZ">viral video</a> with 3 million views, explained what it means for food to be halal. Another popular <a href="http://archive.is/mClkh">post</a> praised the leader of Catholicism for preaching tolerance and coexistence, saying, "Pope Francis is telling some truth. watch and share."</p><p dir="ltr">The Daily Beast did concede this in its article, noting, "Much of the content on the account was apolitical, evincing positive portrayals of Islam and Muslims and debunking some of the very Islamophobic myths Russia was simultaneously deploying through other accounts."</p><p dir="ltr">But this crucial qualifier was later ignored.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Spencer Ackerman's record of fake news</strong></p><p dir="ltr">Spencer Ackerman, a co-author of the Daily Beast story, has a history of spreading fake news of his own. <a href="https://alternettest.wpengine.com/grayzone-project/pundits-slam-trump-praise-mattis-north-korea">As a reporter at Wired</a>, Ackerman <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/13/how-americans-live-today-north-korea-fake-video_n_2868121.html">falsely reported</a> that an obvious satirical spoof video made by a British man was actually official North Korean propaganda.</p><p dir="ltr">Ackerman's history of falsification only scratches the surface of the Daily Beast's hypocrisy. The notion that a Russian troll factory "stirred chaos" by allegedly sharing hyperbolic memes on social media is risible when one considers that American foreign policy, which the Daily Beast vociferously defends, has violently toppled numerous elected governments, assassinated foreign heads of state and trained and funded death squads, while also pursuing less orthodox forms of subterfuge, like creating a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/03/us-cuban-twitter-zunzuneo-stir-unrest">fake Twitter app</a> to spread anti-government propaganda in Cuba.</p><p dir="ltr">With its latest botch job on Russian meddling as a precedent, the Daily Beast's crack team of national security reporters would likely dismiss these historical facts as fake news.</p>