What
Are We To Believe?
Fake news plus phony “intelligence” equal
disaster
By Justin Raimondo
August 11,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- The
Washington Post has published
a story
claiming that the North Korean regime of Kim
Jong Un has succeeded in miniaturizing a nuclear
warhead small enough to fit onto an
intercontinental ballistic missile. It’s another
“leak” coming from an intelligence community
that seemingly does little these days but leak
like a sieve. Which raises the question: Should
we believe them?
What we
are dealing with is a national security
bureaucracy that is not only highly politicized
– that’s not really anything new – but is also
engaged in an extended campaign to accomplish
specific political objectives. The leaks coming
out of Washington have had a clear political
purpose – to a) discredit President Donald
Trump, and b) push us closer to some sort of
conflict on the international stage. And of
course the two are not mutually exclusive:
indeed, they are congruent. For a war on the
Korean peninsula, for example, would define
–and, I would submit, discredit – Trump’s
presidency, as many thousands would die in a
conflagration of unimaginable horror.
The
Post quotes a single sentence of a Defense
Intelligence Agency assessment dated July 28:
“The
IC [intelligence community] assesses North Korea
has produced nuclear weapons for ballistic
missile delivery, to include delivery by
ICBM-class missiles.”
That’s
it: that’s the whole thing. The Post
hasn’t actually seen the document: it was read
to reporters by the leaker. Oh, and “Two U.S.
officials familiar with the assessment verified
its broad conclusions.”
What
“broad conclusions”? The conclusions drawn by
this article aren’t in the least bit broad, but
are instead quite specific. Are they true? We
just don’t know, and, what’s more, we cannot
know. Indeed, we know almost nothing about this
alleged “assessment.” We don’t know the identity
of the leakers. We don’t know their motives.
Based on the sparse information we have, we
cannot evaluate the veracity of this latest
“revelation,” and this is doubly true not only
due to the laconic nature of the reporting, but
also because of the journalistic context in
which it appears.
To begin with, this story is nothing new.
Back in 2013,
Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colorado) blurted out the
DIA’s assessment on Capitol Hill:
“Three hours into a hearing of the House Armed
Services Committee, Lamborn said the Defense
Intelligence Agency, which is under the
Pentagon, determined with ‘moderate confidence’
that North Korea has the capability to make a
nuclear weapon small enough to be launched with
a ballistic missile.
“The
Colorado Springs Republican gleaned the
information from the conclusion of a classified
report, though that sentence was unclassified,
said his spokeswoman Catherine Mortensen.
“Pentagon officials
told The New York Times
that the
information had previously not been released
publicly.
“Pentagon spokesman George Little issued a
statement after the hearing, saying ‘it would be
inaccurate to suggest that the North Korean
regime has fully tested, developed, or
demonstrated the kinds of nuclear capabilities
referenced in the passage.’”
The
Post is telling us the DIA assessment is
fresh off the presses, finished as late as “last
month” – not so! Whether the Post is
being deluded by its sources, or is trying to
delude us in collaboration with its sources, is
up for debate.
Which
brings us to another problem, not only with this
story but with all the “news” we’re getting from
the mainstream media these days: reporters have
become as politicized as their sources in the
intelligence community. The Obama holdovers in
the national security Establishment are not
alone in their campaign to discredit the
President. The media have been complicit all
along: indeed, the legacy media’s journalists
have been eagerly cheerleading the Russia-gate
witch-hunt, and openly proclaiming their
hostility to this administration. This is in
addition to their traditional role as the War
Party’s journalistic camarilla.
While
this particular story is not directly linked to
Russia-gate, or the President’s political
fortunes, what it comes down to is that neither
the sources of this story nor those who are
reporting it can be trusted. It could be
true that the North Koreans have developed the
capability of miniaturizing nuclear warheads,
but we just don’t know. The observant reader is
left in a fog – the fog of an information war in
which journalism is not a means of discovering
knowledge, but a weapon to be deployed in a
political-ideological conflict.
If the media is on a war footing, wielding the
battle-cry “democracy
dies in darkness,”
then today the truth is tangential – because a
few untruths may be necessary in the fight to
push back against the “darkness.”
People
complain that there’s too much news, that the
sheer volume is overwhelming, and disorienting,
but in reality we’re living in a news vacuum
because we don’t know what’s true anymore. All
standards have been thrown out: sure, the
mainstream media was never really objective, but
now even that pretext has been abandoned.
If we
liken the function of the media in a free
society to the function of our eyes and ears,
then we have, in effect, been struck blind and
rendered deaf. Although actually it’s far worse
than that: rather than conveying information
about the real world, the mainstream media is
giving us a highly distorted version of events
–in many cases, a Bizarro World inversion
of what is actually occurring.
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Grants
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All
this is bad enough, but we must take it one step
further. If the media is the eyes and ears of
the public, then the intelligence agencies and
the national security bureaucracy of which they
are a part are Uncle Sam’s sensory organs. The
price to be paid for the politicization and
corruption of the intelligence community is that
US policymakers are operating in the dark –
where not only democracy dies, but also any sort
of rational decision-making. In which case Uncle
Sam is a blinded Titan, deaf to the entreaties
of those he unknowingly tramples underfoot,
stumbling this way and that – with the very
strong possibility of ending up at the bottom of
a cliff.
This epistemological disability brings to mind
two citations, one from the run-up to the Iraq
war and one more recent. The former is the
famous “reality-based community” quote
reported by Ron
Suskind in the course of an interview with a top
aide in George W. Bush’s White House:
“The
aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we
call the reality-based community,’ which he
defined as people who ‘believe that solutions
emerge from your judicious study of discernible
reality.’ … ‘That’s not the way the world really
works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire
now, and when we act, we create our own reality.
And while you’re studying that reality –
judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again,
creating other new realities, which you can
study too, and that’s how things will sort out.
We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will
be left to just study what we do.’"
Suskind wasn’t reporting anything all that
unusual: this is how our political class thinks.
After all, they create the political reality in
which the rest of us are forced to live. Yet
there is a point beyond which this kind of
hubris becomes dangerous – and suicidal. Encased
in a bubble, the Beltway elites never saw the
victory of Trumpism coming – and that failure
may be just the beginning of their undoing (and
our own). For
as Vladimir Putin put it to Oliver Stone:
“I think
that when the United States felt they were at
the forefront of the so-called civilized world
and when the Soviet Union collapsed, they were
under the illusion that the United States was
capable of everything and they could act with
impunity. And that’s always a trap, because in
this situation, a person and a country begins to
commit mistakes. There is no need to analyze the
situation. No need to think about the
consequences. No need to economize. And the
country becomes inefficient and one mistake
follows another. And I think that’s the trap the
United States has found itself in.”
A
person who cannot distinguish fantasy from
reality is clinically insane, or perhaps senile.
What do we call an entire society so afflicted?
Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of
Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph
Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at
The American Conservative, and
writes a monthly column for Chronicles.
He is the author of Reclaiming the
American Right: The Lost Legacy of the
Conservative Movement [Center for
Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate
Studies Institute, 2000], and
An Enemy of the State: The Life
of Murray N. Rothbard
You can buy
An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N.
Rothbard
(Prometheus Books, 2000), my biography of the
great libertarian thinker,
here.
This article was first published by
Anti War
-
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.