intending to bring down Putin’s plane which was flying nearby.45
In September 2016, a Dutch-led investigation provided evidence suggesting that the missile used in the shoot-down was fired from a field controlled by pro-Russian fighters in Ukraine and was brought in from Russian territory. The investigation relied heavily on Ukrainian intelligence sources with a vested interest in blaming Russia, however, and failed to mention that the Ukrainian military controlled all anti-aircraft missile batteries in eastern Ukraine. It also did not have access to U.S. radar data and said it was still trying to establish who the perpetrators were.46 The truth thus remains elusive.
Like the British and French press did in the nineteenth century, the New York Times alleges without substantiation that Russia financed political parties throughout Western Europe in an effort to infiltrate and destabilize the region. Putin also reportedly killed many of his rivals, pilfered millions in state funds and armed the Taliban, though the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency told the Senate he had “not seen any physical evidence.”47 Putin was further accused of covering up Syrian chemical attacks, though it now appears it was not the source of these attacks. The Syrians struck a weapons cache that released toxic clouds of fertilizers that were magnified by dense morning air, as veteran journalist Seymour Hersh reported in a story published only by a German newspaper.48
According to Edward S. Herman, the Times from January 1 to March 21, 2014, had twenty-three articles on the Pussy Riot group to signify alleged Russian limits on free speech, and gave one member of the group op-ed space to denounce Putin. The group had been arrested after disrupting a church service and were given a two-year sentence. Around the same time, eighty-four-year-old Sister Megan Rice was given a four-year jail sentence for protesting a nuclear weapons site in Tennessee, but she was mentioned only in the back pages and not given an opportunity to publish an op-ed. Nor could she meet with the Times editorial board as Pussy Riot did. Another double-standard was the great indignation at Assad-Putin inhumanity in Aleppo compared to the relative silence about rebel atrocities in Syria and civilian casualties in Fallujah and Mosul under U.S.-allied attacks, which were significant.49
The Times meanwhile refused to characterize the Maidan protests that resulted in the overthrow of Yanukovych as a coup when even Maidan protestors in Kiev characterized it as such since they could not pass a referendum for impeachment. The Times in turn sugarcoated the new regime led by Petro Poroshenko, who was described in a WikiLeaks cable from the American embassy as a “disgraced oligarch … tainted by credible corruption allegations,” and appointed as deputy prime minister a member of the far-right Svoboda Party who told the EU parliament that a “fascist dictatorship is the best way to rule a country.”50
The Times further failed to report on the CIA and George Soros Foundation’s role in financing the Maidan protests, and on the humanitarian crisis that resulted from brutal “anti-terrorist” operations directed by Kiev against pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Donbass region who were falsely labeled “pawns of Putin” (the region is, in fact, Russian-speaking and has strong interests in remaining tied to Russia). Warning about the plight of over a million displaced children whose schools had been destroyed, UNICEF referred to “an invisible emergency which most of the world has forgotten.” This was thanks largely to the blackout in the Times and other media that also ignored the machinations of the Biden wing of the Obama administration in undermining efforts by John Kerry to promote the Minsk peace agreements, possibly because of Biden’s son Hunter’s business interests in the Ukraine. Hunter was named to the board of a Ukrainian Natural Gas company in April 2014—just three months after the coup.51
Lessons Not Learned
The similarities between the blitz in 2002–2003 for war against Iraq and for action against Russia and Putin are striking. Many readers will recall how the CIA under George W. Bush leaked phony intelligence to Michael Gordon and Judith Miller of the Times, claiming that Iraq was procuring aluminum tubes to enrich uranium for its nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (WMD). James Carden, a former adviser to the U.S.-Russia Presidential Commission at the State Department, pointed out in 2017 that something eerily similar was taking place regarding Russia, in which “assurances from the intelligence community and from anonymous Obama administration ‘senior officials’ about the existence of evidence [regarding alleged election hacking] is being treated as … actual evidence.”52
As a sign of continuity, Michael Gordon, a chief culprit in “helping to scam the USA into occupation and invasion of Iraq,” is among those who have reported disinformation about Ukraine. Fellow Iraq War cheerleaders have been among the loudest to demonize Putin. Charles Krauthammer told Fox News: “Of course it all [DNC hacks] came from the Russians, I’m sure it’s all there in the intel.” David Frum in The Atlantic stated that Trump “owes his office in considerable part to illegal clandestine activities in his favor conducted by a hostile, foreign spy service.” Jacob Weisberg agrees, tweeting: “Russian covert action threw the election to Donald Trump. It’s that simple.” This is the same Weisberg who wrote back in 2008, “The first thing I hope I’ve learned from this experience of being wrong about Iraq is to be less trusting of expert opinion and received wisdom.”53 Lesson not learned.
Placing the Election Hysteria in Context
When U.S. intelligence agencies finally released a declassified version of its report on the election, the New York Times and the Washington Post quoted from it verbatim, supporting the conclusion that Putin and Russia were behind the DNC hacks. Close reading of the report, however, shows that it barely supports such a conclusion. Devoting considerable attention to the Russia Today (RT) news network, which was impugned for offering critical analysis of U.S. politics, the report merely provided an “assessment,” which journalist Robert Parry notes is an “admission” that the classified information was “less than conclusive because, in intelligence-world-speak” to “assess” actually means “to guess.”54
Historian Gareth Porter writes that the intelligence community never obtained evidence to prove Russia was behind WikiLeaks’ publication of the DNC emails, “much less that it had done so with the intention of electing Trump.” After the U.S. election, DNI James Clapper testified twice before Congress that “the intelligence community did not know who had provided the emails to WikiLeaks and when they were provided.” The NSA further considered the idea that the Kremlin was working to elect Trump as merely plausible, not actually supported by reliable evidence.55
Half of Clinton voters nevertheless believe that Russia not only leaked emails but tampered with vote tallies. A more plausible scenario is that either Clinton blamed Russia to try to save her campaign, or that CIA director John Brennan, appointed by President Obama, initiated the election-hacking scandal and Russia-Gate investigations in order to preserve a belligerent policy toward Russia to which the CIA and other national security organizations were committed. Brennan issued a public warning to Trump about his Russian policy on Fox News. “I think Mr. Trump has to understand that absolving Russia of various actions that it’s taken in the past number of years is a road that he, I think, needs to be very, very careful about moving down.”56
In December 2016, twenty intelligence, military, and diplomatic veterans who had formed Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) sent an open letter to President Obama calling on him to release the evidence that proves Russia aided the Trump campaign—or to admit that it does not exist. They wrote that the alleged Russian interference in the election has been called “an act of war” and Mr. Trump a “traitor”; the “intelligence,” however, to support these assertions, “does not pass the smell test.” Obama never responded.
The VIPS wrote that media attacks against Trump and Putin were lacking journalistic standards as top intelligence officials “published what we found to
