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The Real
Purpose of the U.S. Government’s Report on Alleged
Hacking by Russia
By Chris Hedges
January 10,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Truth
Dig"
-Some
thoughts on “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the
2016 US Presidential Election,” the newly released
declassified report from the Office of the Director
of National Intelligence.
1. The primary
purpose of the declassified report, which offers no
evidence to support its assertions that Russia hacked
the U.S. presidential election campaign, is to discredit
Donald Trump. I am not saying there was no Russian hack
of
John Podesta’s emails. I am saying we have yet to
see any tangible proof to back up the accusation. This
charge—Sen. John McCain has likened the alleged effort
by Russia to
an act of war—is the first salvo in what will be a
relentless campaign by the Republican and Democratic
establishment, along with its corporatist allies and the
mass media, to destroy the credibility of the
president-elect and prepare the way for impeachment.
The allegations
in the report, amplified in breathtaking pronouncements
by a compliant corporate media that operates in a
non-fact-based universe every bit as pernicious as that
inhabited by Trump, are designed to make Trump look like
Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot. An orchestrated and
sustained campaign of innuendo and character
assassination will be directed against Trump. When
impeachment is finally proposed, Trump will have little
public support and few allies and will have become a
figure of open ridicule in the corporate media.
2. The second
task of the report is to bolster the McCarthyist smear
campaign against independent media, including Truthdig,
as witting or unwitting agents of the Russian
government. The demise of the English programming of Al-Jazeera
and TeleSur, along with the collapse of the nation’s
public broadcasting, designed to give a voice to those
not beholden to corporate or party interests, leaves RT
America and Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! as the only two
electronic outlets with a national reach that are
willing to give a platform to critics of corporate power
and imperialism such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden,
Chelsea Manning, Ralph Nader, Medea Benjamin, Cornel
West, Kshama Sawant, myself and others.
Seven pages of
the report were dedicated to RT America, on which I have
a show called “On Contact.” The report vastly inflated
the cable network’s reach and influence. It also
included a few glaring errors, including the statement
that “RT introduced two new shows—‘Breaking the Set’ on
4 September and ‘Truthseeker’ on 2 November—both
overwhelmingly focused on criticism of the US and
Western governments as well as the promotion of radical
discontent.” “Breaking the Set,” with Abby Martin, was
taken off the air two years ago. It could hardly be
tarred with costing Hillary Clinton the election.
The barely
contained rage of Director of National Intelligence
James Clapper at the recent Senate Armed Services
Committee hearing on foreign cyber threats was visible
when he spat out that RT was “promoting a particular
point of view, disparaging our system, our alleged
hypocrisy about human rights, et cetera.” His anger was
a glimpse into how the establishment seethes with hatred
for dissidents. Clapper has lied in the past. He
perjured himself in March 2013 when, three months before
the revelations of wholesale state surveillance leaked
by Snowden, he assured Congress that the National
Security Agency was not collecting “any type of data” on
the American public. After the corporate state shuts
down RT, it will go after Democracy Now! and the handful
of progressive sites, including this one, that give
these dissidents space. The goal is censorship.
3. The third
task of the report is to justify the expansion of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization beyond Germany, a
violation of the promise Ronald Reagan made to the
Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the
Berlin Wall. Expanding NATO in Eastern Europe opened up
an arms market for the war industry. It made those
businesses billions of dollars. New NATO members must
buy Western arms that can be integrated into the NATO
arsenal. These sales, which are bleeding the strained
budgets of countries such as Poland, are predicated on
potential hostilities with Russia. If Russia is not a
threat, the arms sales plummet. War is a racket.
4. The final
task of the report is to give the Democratic Party
plausible cover for the catastrophic election defeat it
suffered. Clinton initially
blamed FBI Director James Comey for her loss before
switching to the more easily demonized Putin. The charge
of Russian interference essentially boils down to the
absurd premise that perhaps hundreds of thousands of
Clinton supporters suddenly decided to switch their
votes to Trump when they read the leaked emails of
Podesta. Either that or they tuned in to RT America and
decided to vote for the Green Party.
The Democratic
Party leadership cannot face, and certainly cannot
publicly admit, that its callous betrayal of the working
and middle class triggered a nationwide revolt that
resulted in the election of Trump. It has been pounded
since President Barack Obama took office, losing 68
seats in the House, 12 seats in the Senate and 10
governorships. It lost more than 1,000 elected positions
between 2008 and 2012 nationwide. Since 2010,
Republicans have replaced 900 Democratic state
legislators. If this was a real party, the entire
leadership would be sacked. But it is not a real party.
It is the shell of a party propped up by corporate money
and hyperventilating media.
The Democratic
Party must maintain the fiction of liberalism just as
the Republican Party must maintain the fiction of
conservatism. These two parties, however, belong to one
party—the corporate party. They will work in concert, as
seen by the alliance between Republican leaders such as
McCain and Democratic leaders such as Sen. Chuck
Schumer, to get rid of Trump, silence all dissent,
enrich the war industry and promote the farce they call
democracy.
Welcome to our
annus horribilis.
Chris
Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a foreign
correspondent in Central America, the Middle East,
Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than
50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science
Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News
and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign
correspondent for 15 years.
The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
not necessarily reflect Information Clearing House
editorial policy. |
