The US on the road to censorship

The USA on the road to censorship

In the wake of the anti-Trump movement and the Russia-Gate “scandal”, a disturbing willingness to silence dissidents is emerging.

One stark difference between today's Washington and the one I experienced as a young Associated Press correspondent in the late 70s and early 80s is that even as the old Cold War was heating up at the time of Ronald Reagan's election, there were prominent mainstream journalists who were skeptical of the excessive demonization of the Soviet Union and who had doubts about the dire claims that Nicaragua and Grenada posed dire threats to U.S. national security.

by Robert Parry

[This article posted on 11/25/2017 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/die-usa-auf-dem-weg-in-die-zensur.]


Perhaps the Vietnam War was still so fresh in people's minds back then that the senior editors and domestic reporters recognized the dangers of mindless groupthink in official Washington, as well as the importance of healthy skepticism about official pronouncements from the U.S. intelligence community.

Today, however, I cannot think of a single important voice in mainstream media news questioning any assertion that defames Russian President Vladimir Putin and his country, no matter how unlikely or absurd it may be. Russia is being beaten up non-stop.

And behind this disturbing anti-Russian uniformity, attacks on independent and dissident journalists and news portals outside the mainstream are on the rise. Not only are we entering a New Cold War and a New McCarthyism; we are also being served up a heavy dose of old-school Orwellianism.

Occasionally, this can be seen in isolated cases, for example when the Huffington Post removed a well-researched story by journalist Joe Lauria from its online offering because he had dared to point out that the Democrats were funding the two elements that triggered what is now known as Russia-Gate: the forensic examination of Democratic National Committee computers and the opposition Trump investigation conducted by former British spy Christopher Steele.

The Huffington Post did not contact Lauria before or after the decision to retract the story, despite his request to know the reasons for this decision. Huffington Post editors told a BuzzFeed journalist that they were responding to reader complaints that the article was full of factual errors. However, these were never explained, and so there is little doubt that Lauria's real mistake was to violate the Russia-Gate groupthink of the anti-Trump resistance movement.
Muzzling Russia Today

In other cases, America's encroaching censorship has been led by U.S. government agencies. For example, when the Department of Justice demanded that the Russian news portal Russia Today register under the restrictive Foreign Agent Registration Act. The law requires such prompt, frequent and detailed disclosure of alleged “propaganda” that Russia Today may no longer be able to operate in the United States.

This attack on Russia Today was rationalized by the “Intelligence Assessment” of January 6, which had actually been prepared by only a handful of “handpicked” analysts from the CIA, FBI and NSA. Its report included a seven-page appendix, dating from 2012, accusing Russia Today of spreading Russian propaganda. And apparently this January 6 report must now be accepted as the one and only truth, no questions allowed.

However, if any real journalist had actually read the January 6 report, he or she would have discovered that Russia Today's dark attack on American democracy included the offense of having held a discussion with candidates who had been excluded from the Republican and Democratic debates in 2012. Indeed, allowing libertarians and environmentalists to express their views is a serious threat to American democracy.

Another of Russia Today's “propaganda” stories involved its coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests and its investigation of the environmental dangers of fracking, topics that have also been widely covered in the domestic American media. As soon as Russia Today covers a newsworthy topic – even if others have covered it too – it is apparently “propaganda” that must be suppressed to protect the American people from it.

Anyone who takes the trouble to look closely at the appendix to the January 6 report will easily come to the conclusion that these “handpicked” analysts are either completely crazy or insane Russophobes. And yet, you dare not question this “intelligence assessment” now, unless you want to be labeled a “Kremlin stooge” or “Putin's useful idiot.”

Incidentally, it was James Clapper, President Obama's Director of National Intelligence, who stated under oath that the analysts from the three intelligence agencies had been ”handpicked.” This means that they were analysts personally selected by Obama's intelligence chiefs from three services – not “all 17”, as the American public was repeatedly led to believe – and therefore were not even representative of the analysts of those three secret services. And yet this subset of a subset is regularly described as “the US intelligence community,” even after major news outlets were forced to retract their “all 17” claim.

And so the myth of the unanimous opinion of the intelligence community lives on. In a peppy Tuesday article about the US government forcing Russia Today to register as foreign agents, Washington Post reporters Devlin Barrett and David Filipov wrote: “US intelligence agencies have concluded that the channel and its website relentlessly disseminate anti-American propaganda under the direction of the Russian government.”

In the old days, even during the old Cold War and when President Reagan railed against “the evil empire,” some of us would have looked at the January 6 report and its indictment of Russia Today and noted how absurd these claims of “relentless anti-American propaganda” are. Whether or not you want to hear the views of the Greens and libertarians – or whether you like fracking and hate Occupy Wall Street – the opportunity to be informed about them does not constitute “mercilessly anti-American propaganda”.

The US government's real quarrel with Russia Today seems to be that it puts on air some Americans who are blacklisted by the mainstream media – including highly credible former intelligence analysts and well-informed American journalists – for challenging various official narratives.

In other words, Americans are not supposed to hear the other side of the story when it comes to major international conflicts, such as the proxy war in Syria or the civil war in Ukraine, or Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians. Only the State Department's accounts of these events are allowed, even when those accounts are themselves propagandistic, if not outright false.

For example, you should not learn about the huge holes in the evidence for the sarin gas attacks in Syria, or that Ukraine's post-coup regime is arming neo-Nazis to kill ethnic Russians in Ukraine, nor about Israel's development into an apartheid state. All reasonable Americans should regularly be served a diet that only shows them how righteous the US government and its allies are. Anything else is “propaganda”.

Also taboo is any thoughtful criticism of this report from January 6 – or apparently Clapper's characterization of this report as a product of “hand-picked” analysts from just three services. You are not supposed to ask why other US intelligence agencies with an in-depth understanding of Russia were excluded and why even other analysts from the three participating intelligence agencies were not included.

No, you must always believe that the January 6 report represents a “consensus” assessment of “all US intelligence agencies”. And you have to accept this as a simple fact – just as the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and other mainstream news outlets do. You shouldn't even notice that the January 6 report itself does not claim that Russian interference in the election is a fact. The report states that “assessments are not meant to imply that we have evidence that something is a fact.”

Even quoting from the January 6 report could make an American journalist something of a traitorous “Russian mole” whose journalistic work needs to be sanitized by “responsible” media and who should be forced to wear the journalistic equivalent of a yellow star.
The anti-Trump and Russia hysteria

Of course, much of this anti-Russian hysteria comes from the anger over the shocking election of Donald Trump, which has now lasted a year. From the first moments of stunned disbelief at Hillary Clinton's defeat, a narrative was set in motion to blame Trump's victory not on Clinton and her miserable campaign, but on Russia. This was also seen as an opportunity to revise the outcome of the election and remove Trump from office.

The major U.S. news media openly took the lead in the resistance. The Washington Post adopted the melodramatic and sanctimonious slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” which it used to unleash its journalists to trumpet the narrative of disloyal Americans spreading Russian propaganda. Presumably, the darkness provides the appropriate environment for stabbing people who question the Russia Gate narrative of the resistance movement.

Last Thanksgiving Day, an early shot was fired in this campaign against information that deviates from the official line when the (Washington) Post ran a front-page article quoting an anonymous group called PropOrNot. It denounced 200 internet news sites for allegedly spreading Russian propaganda. The list included some of the most important sources of independent journalism, including Consortiumnews.com, apparently for the crime of questioning some of the State Department's narratives on international conflicts, particularly Syria and Ukraine.

Then, as anti-Russian hysteria and censorship gathered pace, Congress last December approved a $160 million grant for think tanks and non-governmental organizations to combat Russian propaganda. And soon reports and studies were in high demand that discovered a Russian behind every article, tweet and post that did not conform to the State Department line.

The New York Times and other leading news outlets have embraced plans for Google, Facebook and other tech companies to use algorithms that can detect, marginalize or outright eliminate information that the mainstream media deems “fake” or “propaganda.” In an initial draft, Google has already forged a coalition of mainstream media and establishment-approved websites to decide which information should be allowed to pass and which should not.

Among these truth apostles are the fact-checkers at PolitiFact, who judged the lie of “all 17 services” that had allegedly endorsed the claim of Russian hacking to be “true”. And this despite the fact that this claim was never true and has since been unequivocally proven false. PolitiFact continues to insist that this lie is the truth. Evidently, this organization is consumed by the hubris that comes with the power to determine what is true and what is a lie.

What particularly disturbs me about this development is the silence of many civil rights lawyers, liberal politicians and defenders of freedom of the press, on whom one might have counted in the past to stand up against this censorship and this exclusion.

It seems that the goal of defeating Donald Trump and demonizing Vladimir Putin justifies any means, regardless of the existential threat of nuclear war with Russia or the threat to freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of thought, reminiscent of McCarthyism (or even Orwellian).