US Pundits, Politicians Tacitly Admitting They Lied About Russia
An anti-Trump, anti-Russia demonstration in the US.
Caitlin Johnstone writes in Medium:
It has been nearly three weeks since The Nation pushed an explosive memo from the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity into mainstream consciousness with an article detailing the evidence that the DNC leaks last year could not have been the result of a Russian hack. By continuing to ignore it, the US intelligence community and all the pundits and politicians who have advanced the Russian hacking narrative are tacitly admitting that they lied.
The report is unequivocal. Not only could Russian hackers not have obtained the DNC emails in the way they are alleged to have obtained them, but metadata was in fact manipulated to implicate Russia in the leak. Since publication of the viral Nation article, even more evidence has come to light showing that a hack is far more improbable even than originally suspected. This means that there is currently more publicly-available evidence indicating that Russia did not hack the DNC than there is that it did.
These earth-shattering revelations have gone all but ignored by the mainstream media, which had until the report surfaced been pummelling the American psyche with relentless fearmongering about the Great Russian Menace. The unquestioned narrative that Russia attacked American democracy in what many establishment politicians have horrifyingly labeled an “act of war” quickly transformed into ridiculous unsubstantiated claims about the Kremlin having taken over the highest levels of the US government and McCarthyite witch hunts against anyone who questioned these baseless assertions. This fact-free hysteria was used to manufacture support for new cold war escalations which remain in place to this day, threatening the existence of all life on earth.
Far from addressing the massive, gaping plot holes that have suddenly emerged in its frenzied narrative, the mass media has all but ghosted from the scene. Russia gets an occasional mention now and again, but the fever-pitch shrieking panic has unquestionably been dialed down by several orders of magnitude.
This is unacceptable. You don’t get to lie to the American people for nine months, terrify them with fact-free ghost stories that their nation has been taken over by a hostile foreign body, use their terror to manufacture support for a new cold war, and then change the subject to Nazis and Joe Arpaio as soon as evidence emerges that you’ve been reporting blatant falsehoods. That is not a thing. You need to either thoroughly refute every single argument against the narrative you’ve been spinning or admit publicly that you’ve been catastrophically wrong. You need to either (A) prove that you have not knowingly and/or unknowingly deceived the world, or (B) do everything you can to fix the damage that you have done.
Until the US intelligence community, the mainstream media, and the politicians who’ve been advancing this Russian hacking narrative do one of these two things, their silence on the matter should be interpreted as a tacit admission that they’ve been lying to us this entire time. After Iraq there was already no reason to give these institutions the benefit of the doubt, and since the VIPS report there is every reason in the world to believe that they’ve been lying to advance domestic and foreign agendas. They either refute the VIPS report in its entirety, or we must treat their refusal to do so as a tacit admission of nothing less than a crime against humanity.
Nothing else should be accepted or respected. Until they show up for this debate the only correct response to every intelligence report on anything whatsoever is “Yeah but you guys lied to us about Russia and started a new cold war, so fuck off.” Until they show up for this debate the only correct response to every Washington politician whenever they open their mouths is “Yeah but you guys lied to us about Russia and started a new cold war, so fuck off.” Until they show up for this debate the only correct response to every narrative promulgated by the corporate media is “Yeah but you guys lied to us about Russia and started a new cold war, so fuck off.”
Do not forget. Do not forgive. Keep driving this through until the blade comes out the other side. Their silence is inexcusable. Do not allow these liars to shift gears. They show up for this debate or we keep shoving this in their faces until their whole machine falls to pieces.
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“You don’t get to lie to the American people for nine months, terrify them with fact-free ghost stories that their nation has been taken over by a hostile foreign body, use their terror to manufacture support for a new cold war, and then change the subject to Nazis and Joe Arpaio as soon as evidence emerges that you’ve been reporting blatant falsehoods. ”
In reality they do.
You can stamp your feet all you like Caitlyn. And you can ban everyone who disagrees with you on Medium (that must be in the thousands now).
But at the end of the day, you don’t have any answers either. Your polemics are tired and overdone.
Your flirtations with right wing demagogues are damning and your style is just polemic.
Oops that should be “your style is just pathetic”.
PS to the editors of OG, I’d hate to see this writer’s stuff on OG much more. She censors her Medium feed like the Grauniad but worse.
She tolerates absolutely no criticism. I suspect she is a gate keeper with links to fascist Trumpist elements.
The media yaps as the caravan goes on…
No matter that the narrative is false, the story has got out their, so job done!
It is important to hold the weasel words of the itinerant media to account, but expecting an apology is well hoping for too much. Where would you (or they) start?
When a narrative goes quite, as with the Russian Hacking meme, we realise that the whole story cannot be brought to a conclusion as it is false. But the thrust of the image goes on in another form.
All we can do is continue to challenge.
If we received an apology would it be believable? Probably not.
They didn’t deceive the American public……only the half that voted for Hillary. The rest of us knew they were lying from the beginning. We’re smart enough to see how they spin every word and action into something it’s not. I won’t wait for them to admit they were wrong or outright lied. It’s already obvious to anyone who is capable of thinking for themselves.
That’s about the same time that the “Trump is a Nazi” meme started getting pushed by the MSM 24/7 and is still being shoved down our throats.
American–me included–you’re getting to see one of our ‘Color Revolutions’ from the inside. Rather nasty, isn’t it?
“…their silence on the matter should be interpreted as a tacit admission that they’ve been lying to us this entire time.” And that they have not given up hope that some more fabricated ‘evidence’ will be produced by the spooks.
I vain. They do not learn. These are the same people who trusted the CIA etc to ‘discover’ WMD hoards or, at the very least, forge correspondence, after the Iraq invasion, to save their sorry reputations. What they do not learn is that the powers that be hold them in even greater contempt than they do dissidents. Something on which we can all agree.
In vain, that is.
We we all do it Bevin. No need to aploogise.
Having a whole article in quote italics kind of defeats the purpose of using them, and merely undermines overall readability. Other than that, I totally agree with the article’s content. Keep up the good work.
Agreed. Can’t OFFG go back to a the formal style of printing and stay away from having the entire story in that sickly-looking, pale grey font?
I agree with 0use4msm and Greg. The italic print columns are also rather narrow. It’s just hard to read the articles. Is there some technical reason for using this format?
That said, keep up the good work, OffG!
Excellent, Caitlin!
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”??? Rumsfeld.
Let’s recap?
Sec State Hillary Clinton was so ineptly corrupt and/or computer illiterate, that, for three months, she stored beyond Top Secret Special Access Program data on an unencrypted server; stored classified information offsite on Platte River and Datto Inc backup servers.; couldn’t even use a printer, so she got Huma Abedin to transfer (classified) data to her philandering paedophile ex, whilst he was sexting up to 100 (underage?) women; and even allegedly got her maid to print off classified documents.
The DNC similarly used unencrypted servers (that were never forensically investigated by the FBI); Debbie Wasserman Schulz (DWS) hired the Awan brothers as IT consultants; who had full access to their servers – including DWS’ iPad password to the leaked DNC emails!; who stole $120,000 worth of IT equipment; also stored data offsite (on hard drives they destroyed); were paid an exorbitant $5m – suggesting blackmail or fraud; who were arrested trying to leave the country for Pakistan (ISI links?)…
BUT IT WAS DEFINITELY A RUSSIAN HACK…
The Forensicator and VIPS provide incontrovertible evidence that the files were transferred locally by someone with direct access (Seth Rich or Imran Awan perhaps?)…
BUT IT WAS STILL DEFINITELY A RUSSIAN HACK!!!
[Due to the overwhelming reams of media and government intelligence ‘analysis’; that is “spotlessly free of evidence” and a “disgrace to the Intelligence Community” {Ray McGovern} – it is pure conspiracy theory to say otherwise – and if you do dare say otherwise – “there will be consequences” (said DWS). And there have been.]
My old and deteriorating eyes have a lot of trouble reading texts in italics and in grey rather than black.
“Until the US intelligence community, the mainstream media, and the politicians who’ve been advancing this Russian hacking narrative do one of these two things, their silence on the matter should be interpreted as a tacit admission that they’ve been lying to us this entire time. ”
Let’s not leave out those on the pseudo left, including some blogs who should know better, who let themelves be suckered into advancing this fake news narrative so they could indulge in an orgy of virtue signaling; jetisioning internationalism in favour of the ground chosen by the neo con right , identity.
So typical of the MSM , MIC driven bull$hit .Same old , same old.Until they are brought to account on the world stage , they will continue to do the same ,spread lies and when exposed run away and pretend nothing happened.Until they fess up then“Yeah but you guys lied to us about Russia and started a new cold war, so fuck off.”
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