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Congress
Grovels Before the CIA as it Escalates “Russian Hacking”
Hysteria
By Patrick Martin
January 06,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "WSWS"
-
The political firestorm over allegations of Russian
hacking in the US presidential election campaign reached
a new peak with the hearing Thursday before the Senate
Armed Services Committee, where three top intelligence
officials testified for several hours. The three
officials refused to provide any evidence to support the
claims that the Russian government directed hacking into
the email of the Democratic National Committee and
Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
Nor is there
any such evidence in the 50-page report the intelligence
agencies delivered to President Obama Thursday, to be
followed by briefings of congressional leaders and
President-elect Donald Trump on Friday. According to the
Washington Post, “US officials said there are
no major new bombshell disclosures even in the
classified report,” let alone the declassified version
that is to be made public on Monday.
This did not
stop the chairman of the Armed Services Committee,
Senator John McCain, from describing the alleged hacking
as “an act of war” and repeatedly urging the
intelligence officials to embrace that
terminology—language with the most ominous implications,
given that the United States and Russia, between them,
control more than 95 percent of the world’s nuclear
weapons.
McCain’s
bellicose comments were echoed by committee Democrats,
who attacked Trump for his Twitter comments citing the
lack of evidence of any Russian involvement and noting
that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has publicly
denied that Russia was the source for Democratic Party
emails his organization made public.
Given the
incessant campaign to transform the alleged hacking into
a pretext for war with nuclear-armed Russia, let us
conduct a reality check. What was actually uncovered by
the hacking into the DNC and the Clinton campaign?
The material
released by WikiLeaks exposed two major facets of the
2016 presidential campaign: the deliberate sabotage of
the Bernie Sanders campaign by the DNC leadership, which
put its thumb on the scale in favor of Clinton; and the
abject subordination of Clinton to the financial
aristocracy, documented in the transcripts of her
speeches to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms.
The term
“hacking the election” has been thrown about, although
US intelligence agencies have said there is no evidence
that a single ballot was miscast or miscounted as a
result of electronic interference with the conduct of
the vote. The sole consequence of the alleged hacking
was the publication of true information about actions by
Democratic Party officials and Clinton herself that
discredited her campaign. It is this which the Democrats
and their media supporters wish to suppress.
Press reports
Thursday readily conceded that the “crime” in question
was not the hacking of the material from the DNC and
Podesta, but the delivery to WikiLeaks to make it
public. The New York Times wrote that the
alleged Russian hacking group “is blamed not just for
taking emails from the DNC, the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee and Mr. Podesta, but also making them
public,” an action which amounted to “turning a
traditional espionage operation into an attempt to
influence the election…”
A
Washington Post columnist acknowledged, “We will
stipulate that governments regularly spy on each other,
and the United States also gathers intelligence on
governments like Russia, China and India. The difference
here is that intelligence operations allegedly led to
the release of information to the public, via WikiLeaks
and media coverage.”
Here, to put it
plainly, is the real “crime,” as far as the US ruling
elite is concerned: someone—the identity of the actual
leaker or hacker is irrelevant—gave the American people
access to material that documented the conspiracy of
Democratic Party leaders against the democratic rights
of the members of their own party who supported Sanders,
and also demonstrated the class interests served by
Hillary Clinton, the favorite of the party
establishment.
It is
remarkable that in the vast media furor over the alleged
Russian hacking, there has been almost no reference to
the content of the material revealed. The attitude of
press organs of big business such as the New York
Times and the Washington Post suggests
that if one of their reporters had received the DNC
emails from an unknown source—as a Times
reporter supposedly received Donald Trump’s tax
return—the editors would have suppressed the
information.
In fact, it is
more than likely that this is exactly what happened. No
one has asked the Times or the Post
when they first learned of the DNC campaign against
Sanders or received transcripts of Clinton’s speeches to
Wall Street. It is doubtful that WikiLeaks was the first
media outlet to do so. But WikiLeaks conducted
themselves as actual journalists, not stenographers for
the CIA and Pentagon, and made the secret documents
public, damaging the candidate who was the overwhelming
favorite of the military-intelligence leadership. For
that and other exposures, Julian Assange has earned the
undying hatred of American imperialism and its
servants—and the thanks of the international working
class.
And what of
Senator Sanders himself, and his liberal ally Senator
Elizabeth Warren? As the campaign over alleged Russian
hacking has unfolded in the media, these political
cowards have prostrated themselves before the
intelligence agencies. This fact exposes yet again the
absurdity of their pretense to represent an opposition.
They share the basic class outlook of the entire
political establishment, Democratic and Republican,
which regards the military-intelligence apparatus as its
last line of defense against the working class, at home
and abroad.
At Thursday’s
hearing, Republicans and Democrats took turns urging the
spy chiefs to denounce Assange for the publication by
WikiLeaks of US military and diplomatic communications
that document war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and
conspiracies against governments around the
world—activities that make hacking the email of the DNC
pale by comparison.
The New
York Times wrote, “The gathering was extraordinary
as much for its context as its content—a public,
bipartisan display of support for the intelligence
community that seemed aimed, at times, at an audience of
one” (i.e., Trump).
Senators from
the two parties—most of whom supported the Iraq war on
the basis of lies about “weapons of mass
destruction”—seemed to be in competition to demonstrate
the most abject loyalty to the intelligence agencies.
They were all speaking from talking points supplied by
the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon. Senator
Joseph Donnelly, an Indiana Democrat, was the most
sycophantic, telling the spy chiefs that in a
truth-telling competition with Assange and WikiLeaks,
“We’re on your side every time.”
This theme was
elaborated explicitly in an editorial in the Thursday
edition of the Washington Post, which berated
Trump for dismissing the claims of Russian hacking of
the Democrats, which it described as an effort to “deny
reality.” Declaring that Trump would soon have to rely
on “intelligence pros” to help him conduct US foreign
policy, the editorial asked, “Why does Mr. Trump give
Mr. Assange more weight than the U.S. intelligence
agencies?”
Trump seemed to
retreat in the face of the media barrage, tweeting his
disapproval of Assange and his love for the intelligence
agencies. But the Post’s question should be
turned back on the newspaper itself. Why should anyone
believe Assange? Because WikiLeaks has conducted actual
journalistic investigation, uncovering evidence of US
government crimes and making it public.
The
intelligence agencies, by contrast, are proven liars. No
senator challenged the veracity of the panel of
witnesses, who were headed by retired general James
Clapper, the director of national intelligence. By
rights, Clapper should have been jailed for perjury
after his sworn testimony before Congress in March 2013.
Asked point-blank, “Does the NSA collect any type of
data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of
Americans?” Clapper responded with the flat denial, “No,
sir.” Three months later, Edward Snowden revealed that
the NSA has hundreds of programs to collect the
telecommunications and Internet activities not only of
every American, but of every human being on the planet.
The public,
bipartisan display of support for the “intelligence
community” is aimed at delegitimizing any opposition to
the numberless crimes committed by the US
military-intelligence apparatus against the population
of the world, including the American people, on a daily
basis.
The CIA is an
organization dripping with blood, detested by hundreds
of millions around the world, including in the United
States, as the instigator of countless coups, massacres,
assassinations and wars. From Iran in 1953 and Guatemala
in 1954, to Indonesia in 1965 and Chile in 1973, to the
bloodbaths in Central America in the 1980s, to today’s
mass repression in Egypt and drone warfare in a dozen
countries, the CIA is a byword for criminality.
On Thursday,
dozens of US senators prostrated themselves before the
intelligence agencies. Some 40 years before, in a
similar committee room, senators took sworn testimony
about how the CIA had been running a “Murder
Incorporated” in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
That
investigation was a byproduct of the Watergate crisis
that forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
At the time, it was revealed that former CIA personnel
had been employed at Nixon’s Committee for the
Re-Election of the President, or CREEP, and were
involved in organizing the burglary of the Watergate
hotel. The congressional inquiry led to the exposure of
illegal spying on the American people and the
infiltration of government agents into antiwar, civil
rights, labor and socialist organizations.
Four decades
ago, it was possible for the US ruling elite to conduct
a limited “reform” of the CIA, which amounted to
removing a few discredited officials and setting some
limits on the agency’s operations—limits that were
quickly breached in practice. Today, even such a largely
cosmetic exercise is impossible. Instead, the
intelligence agencies demand unquestioning loyalty, and
the Democrats and the media salute.
The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
not necessarily reflect Information Clearing House
editorial policy.
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