Trump Vs. Tillerson: War Or Diplomacy?
Monday October 2, 2017
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A website built by researchers working with the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan, transatlantic project to counter Russian disinformation, showed tweets promoting both sides of the football debate from 600 accounts that analysts identified as users who spread Russian propaganda on Twitter. A Senate aide said the website was viewed as credible among congressional investigators.But a cursory glance at Hamilton68 - which is mostly funded by the US and NATO states (Bill Kristol is on the project's board, need we say more?) - reveals that both its list of "600 accounts" and methodology for determining these accounts as purveyors of "Russian disinformation" are largely hidden from public view.
The U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee issued subpoenas in August seeking “any and all documents” about both agencies’ dealings with former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, according to a letter seen by Reuters from committee chairman Devin Nunes, a Trump supporter.As we noted earlier this month when the subpoenas were first filed, the now-infamous Trump dossier was provided to the FBI even though it contained knowingly inaccurate allegations. Russia-born financier and Putin opponent Bill Browder revealed as much during an explosive piece of testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee over the summer that was multilaterally ignored by the media, when he claimed that the document was indirectly financed by a “senior Russian government official.”
Steele compiled the so-called Trump dossier, which Trump was told by FBI director James Comey contained salacious material about the businessman-turned president. Trump and his associates have said the dossier’s contents were false.
These arguments and essays have been very effective in further exposing how utterly fact-free the neoconservative establishment’s campaign to manufacture support for escalating tensions with Russia has been, but in my opinion there’s one extremely important and intensely creepy aspect of this whole thing that needs a bit more attention.
Is it not disturbing, in and of itself, that your government is concerning itself with attempting to “fight foreign propaganda” on your behalf? Even if all their allegations were true about Russian Facebook ads and Twitter bots targeting key US demographics to try and manipulate voter turnout in Donald Trump’s favor, is not the underlying assumption in those allegations the notion that there are some ideas that the American people should not have been exposed to? That Americans are too stupid to show up to the polls and vote in their best interest unless they’re kept isolated from the narratives being promulgated by other governments?
How creepy is that?? How creepy is it that the US government kept sending Facebook back again and again to search for evidence of Russian meddling via propagandistic advertisements and then used the non-evidence they finally returned with to support their argument that more needs to be done to fight foreign propaganda on behalf of the public? How creepy is it that the US Senate is trying to label WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service” to expand the US government’s authority to stamp out the outlet’s ability to share authentic, factual documents with the world?
