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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 9/12/17

Has the NYT Gone Collectively Mad?

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So, this "army" is really not an "army" and we don't even know that it is "Russian." But some readers might say that surely we know that the Kremlin did mastermind the hacking of Democratic emails!

That claim is supported by the Jan. 6 "intelligence community assessment" that was the work of what President Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called "hand-picked" analysts from three agencies -- the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation. But, as any intelligence expert will tell you, if you hand-pick the analysts, you are hand-picking the conclusions.

Agreeing with Putin

But some still might protest that the Jan. 6 report surely presented convincing evidence of this serious charge about Russian President Vladimir Putin personally intervening in the U.S. election to help put Donald Trump in the White House. Well, as it turns out, not so much, and if you don't believe me, we can call to the witness stand none other than New York Times reporter Scott Shane.

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Shane wrote at the time: "What is missing from the [the Jan. 6] public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies' claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. ... Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to 'trust us.'"

So, even Scott Shane, the author of last Friday's opus, recognized the lack of "hard evidence" to prove that the Russian government was behind the release of the Democratic emails, a claim that both Putin and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who published a trove of the emails, have denied. While it is surely possible that Putin and Assange are lying or don't know the facts, you might think that their denials would be relevant to this lengthy investigative article, which also could have benefited from some mention of Shane's own skepticism of last January, but, hey, you don't want inconvenient details to mess up a cool narrative.

Yet, if you struggle all the way to the end of last Friday's article, you do find out how flimsy the Times' case actually is. How, for instance, do we know that "Melvin Redick" is a Russian impostor posing as an American? The proof, according to Shane, is that "His posts were never personal, just news articles reflecting a pro-Russian worldview."

As it turns out, the Times now operates with what must be called a neo-McCarthyistic approach for identifying people as Kremlin stooges, i.e., anyone who doubts the truthfulness of the State Department's narratives on Syria, Ukraine and other international topics.

Unreliable Source

In the article's last section, Shane acknowledges as much in citing one of his experts, "Andrew Weisburd, an Illinois online researcher who has written frequently about Russian influence on social media." Shane quotes Weisburd as admitting how hard it is to differentiate Americans who just might oppose Hillary Clinton because they didn't think she'd make a good president from supposed Russian operatives: "Trying to disaggregate the two was difficult, to put it mildly."

Couple walking along the Kremlin, Dec. 7, 2016.
Couple walking along the Kremlin, Dec. 7, 2016.
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According to Shane, "Mr. Weisburd said he had labeled some Twitter accounts 'Kremlin trolls' based simply on their pro-Russia tweets and with no proof of Russian government ties. The Times contacted several such users, who insisted that they had come by their anti-American, pro-Russian views honestly, without payment or instructions from Moscow."

One of Weisburd's "Kremlin trolls" turned out to be 66-year-old Marilyn Justice who lives in Nova Scotia and who somehow reached the conclusion that "Hillary's a warmonger." During the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, she reached another conclusion: that U.S. commentators were exhibiting a snide anti-Russia bias perhaps because they indeed were exhibiting a snide anti-Russia bias.

Shane tracked down another "Kremlin troll," 48-year-old Marcel Sardo, a web producer in Zurich, Switzerland, who dares to dispute the West's groupthink that Russia was responsible for shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine on July 17, 2014, and the State Department's claims that the Syrian government used sarin gas in a Damascus suburb on Aug. 21, 2013.

Presumably, if you don't toe the line on those dubious U.S. government narratives, you are part of the Kremlin's propaganda machine. (In both cases, there actually are serious reasons to doubt the Western groupthinks which again lack real evidence.)

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Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at
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