Is This Just Fake News on Steroids?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

A partially declassified report released Jan. 5 outlines what America’s top intelligence agencies view as an elaborate “influence campaign” ordered by President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

The CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency described the operation as Russia’s effort to “undermine the U.S.-led democratic order” and to skew the outcome of the 2016 presidential race in favour of Donald Trump.

As far as I can tell, the Russian “cyber attack” that supposedly “hacked the American election” consisted of getting hold of Democratic National Committee e-mails and disseminating them; no bullets used, no one killed, no stuffing of ballot boxes.

It was just the modern version of steaming open letters, copying the contents, and mailing them to newspapers, or of instructing hack journalists on your payroll to write slanted articles. There is nothing new about any of that.

It bears repeating, yet again, that the hacked e-mails were not forgeries but genuine. They drew attention to the way the DNC had been working on Hillary Clinton’s behalf to defeat Bernie Sanders in the primaries.

Yet American cable channels such as CNN and MSNBC devote almost their entire news coverage to insisting that Russia hacked the electoral process. They seem intent on “shaping the narrative” that Russia is once again, as during the Cold War, an evil empire wreaking havoc.

The claim of Russian interference in the election has led to the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats and closure of two diplomatic compounds in the United States.

Actually, just about everything written or said during the contest influenced people one way or the other. Every oped, every feature story, every newscast. Naturally -- that’s what a campaign is all about.

Unfortunately, American elections have degenerated to the point that both major parties concentrate, not on the issues, but on what the Russians call “kompromat”: each candidate publicizes every piece of dirt they can uncover on the other.

If they were won or lost on the issues, rather than on the equivalent of National Enquirer style yellow journalism and gossip, none of this would even work.

There’s another way you can tell that the issue of “Russian hacking” has been blown up out of all proportion.

We are told that it has been going on for years, yet prior to Clinton’s loss, the media showed little interest, and the story would have remained buried – in contrast to genuine “acts of war” such as, for example, the bombing of Pearl Harbor – had Clinton won the election.

After all, she wouldn’t have wanted to call attention to the unethical methods of the Democratic Party officials who stacked the deck on her behalf against Sanders.

In a press conference held Oct. 18, Barack Obama told reporters that “there is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even rig America’s election, in part because they’re so decentralized.” He certainly changed his tune after Clinton lost!

For what it’s worth, I do think hackers sponsored by the Russian government did the deed, though we have seen no hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims. And America’s intelligence agencies have been wrong many times before.

In early 2003, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking to the UN, justified the impending invasion of Iraq by claiming that Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction.

Powell presented surveillance photographs to support this claim.  But it turned out that in fact there were none.

We also know that the intelligence services in 2011 lied about the terrorist attack against the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. They backed up the politically motivated narrative of the Obama administration that the attack was due to a video.

There was no shortage of misleading and intentional misinformation during the Vietnam War, for those of us old enough to remember it.

Lyndon Johnson’s fabricated 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which an American destroyer exchanged fire with North Vietnamese torpedo boats, served as a pretext for a Congressional resolution allowing the bombing North Vietnam and the escalation of the war.

Trump has stated that only fools would oppose better relations with Russia. But most of the American political class, and the heavily Democratic-leaning media, still refuse to accept him as the duly elected president.