A Case Study in
the Creation of False News
By Paul Craig
Roberts
January 06,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- For many weeks we have witnessed the extraordinary
attack by the CIA and its assets in Congress and the
media on Donald Trump’s election. In an unprecedented
effort to delegitimize Trump’s election as the product
of Russian interference in the election, the CIA, media,
senators and representatives have consistently made wild
accusations for which they have no evidence. The CIA’s
message to Trump is clear: Get in line with our agenda,
or we are going to mess you over.
It is clear
that the CIA is warring against Trump. But the CIA’s
media assets have turned the facts on their head and are
blaming Trump for having a negative view of the CIA.
Consider the
January 4 Wall Street Journal article by Damian Paletta
and Julian E. Barnes, which begins: “President-elect
Donald Trump, a harsh critic of U.S. intelligence
agencies . . .” The two presstitutes set up their false
news story by putting the shoe on the other foot. It is
Trump who is the harsh critic rather than the victim of
the CIA’s harsh accusations. Set up this way, the story
continues:
“White House
officials have been increasingly frustrated by Mr.
Trump’s confrontations with intelligence officials.
‘It’s appalling,” the official said. “No president has
ever taken on the CIA and come out looking good.’”
Now that the
story is Trump taking on the CIA and not the CIA taking
on Trump, the case can be built against Trump:
Analysts
accustomed to more cohesion with the White House are
“jarred” by Trump’s skepticism of the CIA’s assessment
that Putin got him elected. Trump is supposed to respond
to the allegation by saying: I am not legitimate. Here
take back the presidency.
WikiLeaks’
Assange has stated unequivocally that there was no hack.
The information came to WikiLeaks as a leak, which
suggests that it came from inside the Democratic
National Committee. That Trump sees it this way means,
according to one unidentified official that “It’s pretty
horrifying to me that he’s siding with Assange over the
intelligence agencies.” You see, Trump is supposed to
side with the CIA which is trying to destroy him.
Has the CIA
shot itself in both feet? How can the agency control
policy by manipulating the information fed to the
President when the President does not trust the agency?
Well, there is
the media which can be used to control explanations and
to box in the President. In his just published book, The
CIA As Organized Crime, Douglas Valentine reports that
by the early 1950s the success of the CIA’s Operation
Mockingbird delivered into CIA hands respected members
of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS, other
communication organizations plus stringers, coming to
four to six hundred human media assets. And it didn’t
end there.
“The CIA
established a strategic intelligence network of
magazines and publishing houses, as well as student and
cultural organizations, and used them as front
organizations for covert operations, including political
and psychological warfare operations directed against
American citizens. In other nations, the program was
aimed at what Cord Meyer called the Compatible Left,
which in America translates into liberals and
pseudo-intellectual status seekers who are easily
influenced.
“All of that is
ongoing, despite being exposed in the late 1960s.
Various technological advances, including the internet,
have spread the network around the world, and many
people don’t even realize they are part of it, and
they’re promoting the CIA line. ‘Assad’s a butcher,’
they say, or ‘Putin kills journalists,’ or ‘China is
repressive.’ They have no idea what they’re talking
about, but they spout all this propaganda.”
And there is
Udo Ulfkotte, who drawing on his experience as an editor
of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote a book in
which he reports that the CIA has a hand on every
significant journalist in Europe.
Some who
champion truth hope that the shrinking influence of the
CIA controlled print and TV media will impair the Deep
State’s ability to control explanations. However, the
CIA, State Department, and apparently the Pentagon as
well, are already operating in social media, and they
use trolls in comment sections to discredit
truth-tellers.
The New
York Times’ editors have revealed themselves as complete
tools of the CIA, endorsing every absurd claim about
Russian hacking despite the total absence of any proof
or indeed of any evidence of hacking, and denouncing
Trump for not believing the unsupported allegations of
US intelligence agencies. In the face of John Brennan
and James Clapper’s efforts to delegitimize the
presidency of Donald Trump, the NYTimes asks: “What
plausible reason could Donald Trump have for trying so
hard to discredit America’s intelligence agencies and
their finding that Russia interfered in the presidential
election?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/opinion/donald-trump-casts-intelligence-aside.html?_r=0
That question
prompts a question of its own: “What plausible reason
could the NYTimes have for trying so hard to discredit
the presidency of Donald Trump on the basis of wild
unsupported allegations?”
The fake news
is proliferating. Today (January 6) Reuters reported:
“The CIA has identified Russian officials who fed
material hacked from the Democratic National Committee
and party leaders to WikiLeaks at the direction of
Russian President Vladimir Putin through third parties,
according to a new US intelligence report, (unnamed)
senior US officials said on Thursday.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-cyber-celebrate-idUSKBN14P2NI
Perhaps what
Reuters meant to say but did not is this: “Officials who
spoke on condition of anonymity claimed that the CIA has
identified the Russian officials who fed the hacked
emails to WikiLeaks, but the official did not tell
Reuters who the Russian officials are or how they
identified them.”
In other words,
the Reuters story is just another CIA planted story—a
favor from a media asset. As Udo Ulfkotte told us, this
is how it works.
Next Reuters
tells us that the report is Top Secret, which, of
course, means that we will never see any evidence in
behalf of the CIA’s allegation. We are supposed to trust
that the CIA has the information but can’t tell us. The
Reuters report doesn’t see anything unusual in this.
Another favor by an asset.
In Reuters’
favor-laden news report, Reuters tell us that the hacked
material reached WikiLeaks from Russia’s military
intelligence agency via “a circuitous route” so that
Assange did not know the origin of the material and thus
could say that it was not given to him by a state
agency.
What could be
going on here? Several things come to mind. Perhaps
there is an effort to force Assange to reveal his source
(which could be that DNC staffer who was mysteriously
shot down in the street) as this would be a surefire way
of getting rid of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks has never
revealed a source. Once it does, no further leaks will
flow to WikiLeaks.
Another
possibility is that by persistently making wild
unsupported accusations that Trump was elected by Putin,
the CIA is making it clear to Trump that they are
playing for keeps. Trump is a strong man, but don’t be
surprised if he comes out of the briefing with the CIA
accepting their story as he might be brought to the
realization that the alternative to compliance with the
CIA could be death.
Dr. Paul Craig
Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall
Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week,
Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He
has had many university appointments. His internet
columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts'
latest books are
The Failure of
Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the
West,
How America Was
Lost,
and
The
Neoconservative Threat to World Order.
The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
not necessarily reflect Information Clearing House
editorial policy. |