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Why Are the
Media Taking the CIA’s Hacking Claims at Face Value?
Despite the CIA’s uninspiring record for the past 70
years, the media are defending the agency for all it’s
worth.
By James Carden
December
16, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Nation"
-
In
1977, Carl Bernstein published
an exposé of a CIA program known as Operation
Mockingbird, a covert program involving, according to
Bernstein, “more than 400 American journalists who in
the past 25 years have secretly carried out assignments
for the Central Intelligence Agency.” Bernstein found
that in “many instances” CIA documents revealed that
“journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA
with the consent of the managements of America’s leading
news organizations.”
Fast-forward to December 2016, and one can see that
there isn’t much need for a covert government program
these days. The recent raft of unverified, anonymously
sourced and circumstantial stories alleging that the
Russian government interfered in the US presidential
election with the aim of electing Republican Donald J.
Trump shows that today too much of the media is all too
happy to do overtly what the CIA had it once paid it to
do covertly: regurgitate the claims of the spy agency
and attack the credibility of those who question it.
On
Friday, December 9, The Washington Post, fresh
from publishing a front-page story that
promoted a McCarthyite blacklist, published a piece
that claimed that the CIA “concluded in a secret
assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election
to help Donald Trump win the presidency.” The Post
also claimed that “Intelligence agencies have identified
individuals with connections to the Russian government
who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of
hacked e-mails,” including those of John Podesta.
That same
day,
The New York Times reported that “the
Russians hacked the
Republican National Committee’s computer systems in
addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations,
but did not release whatever information they gleaned
from the Republican networks.” The implication being
that the Russians released the DNC e-mails to hurt
Clinton, but held off on releasing the RNC e-mails in
order to protect Trump.
The
bombshell reports—and Trump’s quick dismissal of them as
“ridiculous”—have dominated the news cycle in the days
since their publication.
The
current fight between Trump and the CIA is of
potentially of historic consequence. Never before has
the intelligence establishment shown so much hostility
to a newly elected president. Never before has a
president shown so little deference to the CIA.
And while
the battle between Trump and the CIA continues to play
out publicly, there remains the very real need for the
public disclosure of as much evidence as possible, given
the severe ramifications a successful foreign
intervention in a US election would have on American
democracy.
A Slam Dunk?
While
Trump’s sin in committing an act of lèse majesté
against the CIA has been treated as a grave
transgression in the eyes of the media, serious
questions remain over the veracity of the CIA’s finding.
After all, several aspects of the Times and
Post reports that actually undermine the dominant
narrative of “Russian interference” are often carefully
cropped out of the mainstream media’s portrayal of the
controversy.
For
example, The Washington Post noted, almost as
an aside, that “intelligence agencies do not have
specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin
‘directing’ the identified individuals to pass the
Democratic emails to WikiLeaks,” while the Times
reported that the RNC had “issued a statement denying
that it had been hacked.” Indeed, the FBI has yet to
make a determination on whether the RNC was hacked,
something that the RNC itself denies.
The lack
of clarity over whether or not the Russian government
hacked the RNC is a critical part of the story, since
the CIA’s “secret assessment” that alleged that the
Russians interfered in the election in order to elect
Trump was,
according to a US official who spoke to Reuters this
week, “based on the fact that Russian entities hacked
both Democrats and Republicans and only the Democratic
information was leaked.”
Meanwhile, much of the media has ignored the
rather salient fact that the FBI is by no means in
agreement with the anonymous and secret CIA assessment
that Russia interfered with the election in order to
help elect Donald Trump.
Nor, for
that matter, is the Office of the Director for National
Intelligence (ODNI), which
has declined to endorse the CIA report. This is
perhaps less surprising than it first might seem,
considering that as recently as November 17 ODNI
Director James Clapper testified before the House
Intelligence Committee and
acknowledged that “as far as the WikiLeaks
connection, the evidence there is not as strong and we
don’t have good insight into the sequencing of the
releases or when the data may have been provided.”
Indeed,
evidence of a connection between the Russian government
and the hackers that are believed to have stolen the
DNC/John Podesta e-mails remains illusory.
Cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr
has observed that “there is ZERO technical evidence
to connect those Russian-speaking hackers to the GRU,
FSB, SVR, or any other Russian government department.”
The very real possibility that non-state actors carried
out the hack of the DNC has been conspicuously absent
from the mainstream narrative of “Russian interference.”
And so,
while the Russian government certainly could have
been behind the DNC/Podesta e-mail hack, the
possibility that it originated elsewhere should not be
so easily dismissed. After all, Wikileaks founder Julian
Assange has
repeatedly denied that Russia was the source of the
DNC/Podesta emails, while a former British ambassador
who is close to Assange has said the
source of the e-mails is “an insider. It’s a leak,
not a hack.”
But that
hasn’t prevented the media from treating the anonymous,
unverified claims of both The Washington Post
and The New York Times, both based on a CIA
“secret assessment,” as gospel.
Media Rushes
to Defend The CIA
Last
weekend, the influential
Sunday morning talk shows took Trump
to task for his dismissal of the CIA’s “secret
assessment.” An incredulous
George Stephanopoulos asked incoming White House
Chief of Staff Reince Priebus: “How is a President Trump
going to work with intelligence agencies if he doesn’t
trust their work?”
“I want
to know,” Stephanopoulos demanded, “why President-elect
Trump doesn’t believe the conclusions of 17 intelligence
agencies.”
On
Face the Nation, Time magazine’s
Michael Duffy said the CIA’s finding was “deeply
disturbing” because “it means that Russia attacked the
United States.” Duffy also expressed “shock” that Trump
has “drawn a fairly dark cloud over his relationship
with the intelligence community on whom he will rely and
need as president.”
And over
at NBC’s Meet the Press,
moderator Chuck Todd warned viewers that the issue
of Russian interference “is not about the results of the
election, it’s about a hostile foreign government trying
to influence our election.” Todd thought it “remarkable”
that Donald Trump decided “to side with a foreign
government over our own chief intelligence agency.”
“Donald
Trump,” he concluded, has “declared war on the
intelligence community.”
The
respected liberal columnist
E.J. Dionne also sprung to the defense of the CIA’s
honor in his column for The Washington Post
on Monday. “When The
Post revealed the CIA’s conclusions about Russia,”
Dionne opined, “Trump’s response was to insult the CIA.”
Still more alarming to Dionne, is that Trump would have
the audacity to “happily trash our own CIA.”
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, December 13, liberal stalwart
Keith Olbermann went much further. In
a commentary for GQ he warned that “the
nation and all of our freedoms hang by a thread. And the
military apparatus of this country is about to be handed
over to scum who are beholden to scum, Russian scum.” He
then tweeted his considered belief that “If
@realDonaldTrump will ignore CIA to listen instead
to Russians, it’s treason.”
The
working assumption here seems to be that the job of the
president (and apparently of media outlets like CNN and
The Washington Post) is to stand, salute, and
never question Langley.
In Langley We
Trust?
The
high-profile anchors and analysts on CNN, CBS, ABC, and
NBC who have cited the work of The Washington Post
and The New York Times seem to have come down
with a bad case of historical amnesia.
The CIA,
in their telling, is a bulwark of American democracy,
not a largely unaccountable, out-of-control behemoth
that has often sought to subvert press freedom at home
and undermine democratic norms abroad.
The
columnists, anchors, and commentators who rushed to
condemn Trump for not showing due deference to the CIA
seem to be unaware that, throughout its history, the
agency has been the target of far more astute and
credible critics than the president-elect.
In his
memoir Present at the Creation, Truman’s
Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote that about the
CIA, “I had the gravest forebodings.” Acheson wrote that
he had “warned the President that as set up neither he,
the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be
in a position to know what it was doing or to control
it.”
Following
the Bay of Pigs fiasco, President John F. Kennedy
expressed his desire to “to splinter the CIA into a
thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
The late
New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan twice
introduced bills, in 1991 and 1995, to abolish the
agency and move its functions to the State Department
which, as the journalist John Judis has observed, “is
what Acheson and his predecessor, George Marshall, had
advocated.”
A
democracy, it is true, cannot function if its elections
are the target of outside powers which seek to influence
it. To see what a corrosive effect outside powers can
have on democratic processes, one need look no further
than the 1996 Russian presidential election, in which
Americans like the regime-change theorist Michael McFaul
(who was later to become US Ambassador to Russia from
2012–14) interfered in order to keep the widely
unpopular Boris Yeltsin in power against the wishes of
the Russian people.
For its
part, the CIA has a
long history of overthrowing sovereign governments
the world over. According to the historian William Blum,
the CIA has “(1) attempted to overthrow more than 50
governments, most of which were democratically-elected,
(2) attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist
movement in 20 countries, (3) grossly interfered in
democratic elections in at least 30 countries, (4)
dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries,
(5) attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign
leaders.”
Perhaps
if it was doing the job of intelligence gathering rather
than obsessively plotting regime change, the CIA would
have amassed a record worthy of the establishment
media’s incessant fawning.
But alas.
Consulting the CIA’s historical record, one is
confronted by a laundry list
of failures, which includes missing both the
break-up of the Soviet Union (during the 1980’s a CIA
deputy director by the name of Bob Gates called the USSR
“a
despotism that works”) and the 9/11 attacks.
In the
years following 9/11, the CIA has been caught
flat-footed by, among other things, the lack of WMD in
Iraq (2003); the Iraqi insurgency (2003); the Arab
Spring (2010);
the rise of ISIS (2013); and the Ukrainian civil war
(2014).
More
recently, CIA Director John Brennan made false
statements before Congress over the CIA’s hacking into
the computers of Congressional staffers.
And yet,
despite its uninspiring record of the past 70 years, the
media has driven itself into a self-righteous frenzy
over what it perceives to be President-elect Trump’s
grave show of disrespect to the CIA.
The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
not necessarily reflect Information Clearing House
editorial policy. |
