Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.”
Most damning is a long quote from a Spencer Ackerman who worked for something called the Washington Independent:
“…What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas cardto let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically….If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the gamethey’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them––Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares– andcall them racists.Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country?What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.”
Smashing somebody’s [sic] through a plate-glass window seems like an odd way to thread a needle, but atrocious prose is the least of the problems here. The problem here isn’t bias, either.
Assuming Ackerman was an opinion writer rather than a straight-news reporter, he was entitled not only to hold his opinions but to express them.
“Spencer, you’re wrong,” wrote Mark Schmitt, now an editor at the American Prospect. “Calling Fred Barnes a racist doesn’t further the argument, and not just because Juan Williams is his new black friend, but because that makes it all about character. The goal is to get to the point where you can contrast something_–Obama’s substantive agenda–with this crap.”
Kevin Drum, then of Washington Monthly, also disagreed with Ackerman’s strategy. “I think it’s worth keeping in mind that Obama is trying (or says he’s trying)
to run a campaign that avoids precisely the kind of thing Spencer is
talking about, and turning this into a gutter brawl would probably hurt
the Obama brand pretty strongly. After all, why vote for him if it turns out he’s not going [to] change the way politics works?”
But it was Ackerman who had the last word. “Kevin, I’m not saying OBAMA should do this. I’m saying WE should do this.”
If anybody on the list objected in principle toAckerman’s idea ofslandering people, including a fellow journalist, as racist,
the Caller missed that part of the story. (We’ll be happy to report it
if a Journolist member would care to supply us with the evidence.)
What Ackerman proposed was to carry out a political dirty trick in order to suppress the news and thereby aid a candidate for public office. That’s about as unethical as journalism can get.
The final product of this debate was a pathetic “open letter,” which, as we noted at the time, was signed by 41 self-described “journalists and media analysts,” nearly all of whom were affiliated with universities, left-wing publications or left-wing think tanks. The letter does seem to have been more of a collaborative effort than we guessed back then: the Caller lists eight people who contributed to its drafting. Even so, what self-respecting journalist shares a byline with 40 other guys?
“The letter caused a brief splash and won the attention of the New York Times,” the Caller reports, but thereafter was deservedly forgotten until now.
Obama weathered the Wright revelations, but it seems a stretch to give
Journolist the credit (or, if you prefer, the blame) for that. On the
other hand, are there other stories they did succeed in suppressing? We
cannot know as long as the full Journolist archives are secret.
“As for sinister implications, is it “secret?” No. Is it off-the-record? Yes. The point is to createa space where experts feel comfortable offering informal analysisand
testing out ideas. Is it an ornate temple where liberals get together
to work out “talking points?” Of course not. Half the membership would
instantly quit if anything like that emerged.”
This statement is true only if parsed as a denial that an email list is an ornate temple. Plainly the list was a forum where liberals got together to work out talking points, as evidenced by that “open letter.”
In 2009 Klein wrote that Journolist’s policy of excluding conservatives was “not about fostering ideology but preventing a collapse into flame war. The emphasis is on empiricism, not ideology.”
“DHS arrived at their initial assessment by evaluating whether the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) observed were consistent with previously observed Russian TTPs, whether the actors used known Russian-affiliated malicious infrastructure, and whether a state or local election system was the target.”...
Another hit piece on Gabbard came from the Daily Beast titled, “Tulsi Gabbard’s Campaign is Being Boosted by Putin Apologists.” This sorry piece of journalism named three of Gabbard’s donors, two of them have been pushing for better US-Russia relations [who wouldn’t be?] and the other one worked for a show on the RT network.
On Friday, the Washington Post ran a story titled, “Mitch McConnell is a Russian Asset."
The article makes the wild accusation that McConnell is doing “Vladimir
Putin’s bidding” since he has blocked some legislation to [allegedly]
further secure elections.
“Dave DeCamp is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn NY,
focusing on US foreign policy and wars. He recently joined Antiwar.com
as an assistant editor. He is on Twitter at @decampdave.” ...........................
DHS compiled an intelligence report suggesting hackers linked to the Russian governmentcould have targetedvoter-related websites in many states and then leaked a sensational
story of Russian attacks on those sites without the qualifications that
would have revealed a different story. When state election officials began asking questions, they discovered that the DHS claims were false and, in at least one case, laughable.
On Sept. 29, 2016, a few weeks after the hacking of election-related websites in Illinois and Arizona, ABC News carried a sensational headline: “Russian Hackers Targeted Nearly Half of States’ Voter Registration Systems, Successfully Infiltrated 4.” The story itself reported that “more than 20 state election systems” had been hacked, and four states had been “breached” by hackers suspected of working for the Russian government. The story cited only sources “knowledgeable” about the matter, indicating that those who were pushing the story were eager to hide the institutional origins of the information.
On Jan. 6, 2017—the same
day three intelligence agencies released a joint “assessment” on Russian
interference in the election—Johnson announced the designation anyway.Media stories continued to reflect the official assumption
that cyber attacks on state election websites were Russian-sponsored. Stunningly, The Wall Street Journalreported in December 2016 that DHS was itself behind hacking attempts of Georgia’s election database.
That was a crucial clue to the motive behind the hack. DHS Assistant Secretary for Cyber Security and Communications Andy Ozment told a Congressional committee in late September 2016 that the fact hackers hadn’t tampered with the voter data indicated that the aim of the theft was not to influence the electoral process. Instead, it was “possibly for the purpose of selling personal information.” Ozment was contradicting the line
that already was being taken on the Illinois and Arizona hacks by the
National Protection and Programs Directorate and other senior DHS
officials.
When FBI Counterintelligence official Bill Priestap was asked in a June 2017 hearinghow Moscow might use such data, his answer revealed that he had no clue: “They
took the data to understand what it consisted of,” said the struggling
Priestap, “so they can affect better understanding and plan accordingly
in regards to possibly impacting future elections by knowing what is
there and studying it.”
They revealed that the sensational story leaked to the press in late
September 2016 had been based on a draft of the DHS report. And more
importantly, their use of the phrase “potentially targeted” showed that they were arguing only that the cyber incidents it listed were possible indications of a Russian attack on election infrastructure.
Furthermore, Liles andManfra said the DHS report had “catalogued suspicious activity we observed on state government networks across the country,” which had been “largely based onsuspected malicious tactics and infrastructure.” They were referring to a list of eight IP addresses an August 2016 FBI “flash alert” had obtained from the Illinois and Arizona intrusions, which DHS and FBI had not been able to attribute to the Russian government.
The cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect noted in 2016 that one of the other two IP addresses had hosted a Russian criminal market for five months in 2015. But that was not a serious indicator, either. Private IP addresses are reassigned frequently by server companies, so there is not a necessary connection between users of the same IP address at different times.
In fact, 14 of the 21 states on the list experienced nothing more than the routine scanning that occurs every day, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Only six involved what was referred to as a “malicious access attempt,” meaning an effort to penetrate the site. One of them was in Ohio, where the attempt to find a weakness lasted less than a second and was considered by DHS’s internet security contractor a “non-event” at the time.
A number of state election officials recognized that this information conflicted with what they knew. And if they complained, they got a more accurate picture from DHS. After Wisconsin Secretary of State Michael Haas demanded further clarification, he got an email response from a DHS official with a different account.
“[B]ased on our external analysis,” the official wrote, “the WI
[Wisconsin] IP address affected belongs to the WI Department of
Workforce Development, not the Elections Commission.”
California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said DHS initially had notified his office “that Russian cyber actors ‘scanned’ California’s Internet-facing systems in 2016, including Secretary of State websites.” But under further questioning, DHS admitted to Padilla that what the hackers had targeted was the California Department of Technology’s network.
Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos and Oklahoma Election Board spokesman Byron Dean also denied that any state website with voter- or election-related information had been targeted, and Pablos demanded that DHS “correct its erroneous notification.”
Despite these embarrassing admissions, a statement issued by DHS spokesman Scott McConnell on Sept. 28, 2017 said the DHS “stood by” its assessment that 21 states “were the target of Russian government cyber actors seeking vulnerabilities and access to U.S. election infrastructure.” The statement retreated from the previous admission that the notifications involved “potential targeting,” but it also revealed for the first time that DHS had defined “targeting” very broadly indeed.
What the DHS said in that meeting, as Reagan’s spokesman Matt Roberts recounted to me, is even more shocking. “When we pressed DHS on what exactly was actually targeted, they said it was the Phoenix public library’scomputers system,” Roberts recalled.In April 2018, a CBS News “60 Minutes” segment reported that the October 2016 DHS intelligence report had included the Russian government hacking of a “county database in Arizona.” Responding to that CBS report, an unidentified “senior Trump administration official” who was well-briefed on the DHS report told Reuters that “media reports” on the issue had sometimes “conflated criminal hacking with Russian government activity,” and that the cyberattack on the target in Arizona “was not perpetrated by the Russian government.”
They sent it to a list of 122 email addresses NSA believed to be local government organizations
that probably were “involved in the management of voter registration
systems.” The objective of the new spear-phishing campaign, the NSA
suggested, was to get control of their computers through malware to
carry out the exfiltration of voter-related data.
The Intercept article included a color-coded chart from the original NSA report that provides crucial informationmissing from the text of the NSA analysis itself as well as The Intercept’s account.
The chart clearly distinguishes between the elements of the NSA’s account of the alleged Russian scheme that were based on “Confirmed Information” (shown in green) and those that were based on “Analyst Judgment” (shown in yellow).
The connection between the “operator” of the spear-phishing campaign
the report describes and an unidentified entity confirmed to be under
the authority of the GRU is shown as a yellow line, meaning that it is based on “Analyst Judgment” and labeled “probably."
A major criterion for any attribution of a hacking incident is whether there are strong similarities to previous hacks identified with a specific actor. But the chart concedes that “several characteristics” of the campaign depicted in the report distinguish it from “another major GRU spear-phishing program,” the identity of which has been redacted from the report.
The NSA chart refers to evidence that the same operator also had
launched spear-phishing campaignson other web-based mail applications,
including the Russian company “Mail.ru.” Those targets suggest that the actors were more likely Russian criminal hackers rather than Russian military intelligence.
Mueller accused two GRU officers of working with unidentified “co-conspirators” on those hacks. But the only alleged evidence linking the GRU to the operators in the hacking incidents is
the claim that a GRU official named Anatoly Kovalev and
“co-conspirators” deleted search history related to the preparation for
the hack after the FBI issued its alert on the hacking identifying the IP address associated with it in August 2016.
A careful reading of the relevant paragraphs shows that the
claim is spurious. The first sentence in Paragraph 71 says that both
Kovalev and his “co-conspirators” researched domains used by U.S. state boards of elections and other entities “for website vulnerabilities.” The second says Kovalev and “co-conspirators” had searched for “state political party email addresses, including filtered queries for email addresses listed on state Republican Party websites.”
In December 2016, DHS and the FBI published a long list of IP addresses as indicators of possible Russian cyberattacks. But most of the addresses on the list had no connection with Russian intelligence, as former U.S. government cyber-warfare officer Rob Lee found on close examination.
“Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner
of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. His latest book is Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.”
………………………..
Comment:Why didn’t anyone demand a recount of 2016 Illinois
results if Illinois is such a big example of Putin's work?
“On Wednesday the alternative media outlet Southfrontpublished an article titled, “New Video Throws Light On Jaysh Al-Izza High-Tolerance To Al-Qaeda Ideology,” about newly discovered footage showing the leader of a “rebel” faction in Syria cozying up with a militant who was wearing a badge of the official flag of ISIS.
“The video shows Jaysh al-Izza General Commander Major Jamil al-Salehcongratulating a group of his fighters on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr in a underground bunker,” Southfront reports. “One of the fighters greeted by Saleh was wearing a batch of the Islamic Black Standard with the Seal of Muhammad. This is a well-known symbol of al-Qaeda and the official flag of ISIS.”
Today, mass media outlets are mourning the death of a well-known Jaysh al-Izza fighter named Abdel-Basset al-Sarout with grief-stricken beatifications not seen since the death of war criminal John McCain. An Associated Press report which has been published by major news outlets like The New York Times, The Guardian, PBS and Bloomberg commemorates Sarout as a “Syrian soccer goalkeeper” who “won international titles representing his country”, as “the singer of the revolution”, and as “an icon among Syria’s [Islamic terrorist] opposition”.Remember Major Jamil al-Saleh from two paragraphs ago? AP features his glowing eulogy in its write-up on Sarout’s death:
Other mainstream outlets like BBC, The Daily Beast and Al Jazeerahave contributed their own fawning hagiographies of the late Jaysh al-Izza commander. ........
“Formed in 2013, Jaysh al-Izza was one of the first [Islamic terrorist] Free Syrian Army (FSA)groups in northern Syria to benefit from U.S. support through the CIA’s [US taxpayer] ‘Timber Sycamore’ train and equip program, which had been approved by then U.S. President Barack Obama,” Southfront reports in the aforementioned article. “The group received loads of weapons from the U.S. including Grad rockets, as well as Fagot and TOW anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs).”"...
(continuing): "“Jaysh al-Izza received this support under the pretension of being a ‘moderate group’led by a known Syrian Arab Army (SAA) defector, al-Saleh,”Southfront adds. “However, the group’s acts were not in line with these claims. Since its formation, Jaysh al-Izza has been deeply linked to al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria, the al-Nusra Front. The group became one of the main allies of al-Nusra when its changed its name to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in 2017.”
“Western thought leaders are lionizing Abdel Baset al-Sarout who was killed fighting the Syrian army,” tweeted journalist Dan Cohen of the mass media response to Sarout’s death. “They conveniently omit that he fought in a militia allied with al-Qaeda and pledged allegiance to ISIS.” ......
Cohen linked to an excerpt from his mini-documentary The Syria Deception featuring footage of Sarout holding an ISIS flag,leading chants calling for the extermination of the Alawite minority in Syria, and announcing his allegiance to ISIS.
Other publicly available video footage includes a speech by Sarout urging cooperation between his own faction, ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra (Al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise), saying “we know that these two groups are not politicized and have the same goals as us, and are working for God.”
“God willing we will work with them shoulder-to-shoulder when we leave here,” Sarout has been translated as
saying in the speech. “And we are not Christians or Shiaa to be scared
of suicide belts and car bombs. We consider these things as strengths of
ours, and God willing they will be just that. This message is to the Islamic State and our brothers in Jabhat al-Nusra, that when we come out of here we will all be one hand to fight Christiansand not to have internal fights among ourselves. We want to take back all the lands that have been filthied by the regime, that were entered and taken over by Shiaas and apostates.” ......
This bloodthirsty terrorist warmongering was taken by the aforementioned AP hagiography and twisted into the single sentence, “He repeatedly denounced [Islamic terrorist] rebel infighting and called on Syrians to unite against government forces.”
The Atlantic’s Hassan Hassan framed Sarout’s unconscionable agendas as mere “flaws”which actually add to his inspiring and heroic story, tweeting,
“Some individuals celebrated as heroes make you doubt all stories of
heroes in history books. Others, like Abdulbasit Sarout,…make those
stories highly plausible. He’s a true legend & his story is well documented. May his soul rest in peace.”
Yeah, come on, everybody’s got flaws. Some people suck at parallel parking, some people team up with ISIS and Al-Qaeda on genocidal extermination campaigns. We’ve all got our quirky little foibles.
You will see continuing melodramatic garment-rending from the US State Department and its mass media stenographers about “war crimes” and “human rights violations” as though the responsibility for this violence rests somewhere other than on the US-centralized power alliance, but they will be lying. What these warmongering propagandists are doing is exactly the same as paying a bunch of violent thugs to break into a home and murder its owner, then standing by and sounding the alarm about the way the homeowner chooses to fight off their assailants.
