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The MoA Week In Review and Open Thread 2018-25
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
Yesterday I planned to write about the FBI spy who tried to infiltrate the Trump campaign. But the Syria piece took longer than anticipated. Now Glenn Greenwald beat me to it:
The FBI Informant Who Monitored the Trump Campaign, Stefan Halper, Oversaw a CIA Spying Operation in the 1980 Presidential Election
The Intercept should not have used "monitored". Prof. Stefan Halper, a man with deep CIA and MI6 connections, spied on the Trump campaign for the FBI. He wasn't an informant, he was an operator. Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller reported the story on March 25 and was the first to name Halper. Larouche Pub and the American Thinker also ran the story and expanded it further.
After the Daily Caller report came out the FBI tried to hide the name of its spy, telling Congress that revealing the name would endanger the man as well as other 'informants' and secret investigations. The main stream media played along and the anti-Trump 'resistance' feigned outrage that anyone would attempt to look into this. But the name was out there all along for everyone to see, as was the whole story.
Greenwald concludes:
Whatever else is true, the CIA operative and FBI informant used to gather information on the Trump campaign in the 2016 campaign has, for weeks, been falsely depicted as a sensitive intelligence asset rather than what he actually is: a long-time CIA operative with extensive links to the Bush family who was responsible for a dirty and likely illegal spying operation in the 1980 presidential election. For that reason, it’s easy to understand why many people in Washington were so desperate to conceal his identity, but that desperation had nothing to do with the lofty and noble concerns for national security they claimed were motivating them.
Amen.
Use as open thread …
“Sergei Skripal discharged from hospital after being poisoned by ‘deadly’ agent”
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The link is to RT, in case anyone missed this report.
It’s been a busy “news” week, between significant geopolitical events, the usual US school massacres, and the bread-and-circuses distraction of a UK Royal Wedding. Perhaps this is why the above-cited “news” didn’t seem to get much attention.
I’ll stop enclosing “news” in ironic quotation marks– the ” key on my laptop is buckling under the strain of overuse. But I used them because every fresh installment of alleged news about the Skripals simply extends, or exacerbates, the riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma that is l’affaire Skripal.
One reason for the lack of reaction to this latest “development” (those quotes needed again) is that it is shown through a glass darkly– the glass being the government controlled and managed information bubble. Like the earlier “developments”, it’s eerily self-contained.
Like many barflies, I have my idiosyncratic axes to grind, soapboxes to climb, bees in my bonnet, etc. After the mysterious events of 9/11/2001, I coined the term “pernicious factoids” to describe the bits of manufactured falsehoods and disinformation used to construct and perpetuate bogus Official Narratives.
For example, not long ago a minor New York Times article about Lee Harvey Oswald’s gravesite began with something like, “When Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy in Dealey Plaza…”. This is a pernicious factoid; they remain embedded like toxic prions in the collective consciousness, and are regarded as reasonably true, correct, and meaningful.
Likewise, the other day the Russian ambassador to the UK, Alexander Yakovenko, gave a routine press conference. As usual, some wretched would-be UK journalist took issue with Yakovenko’s reiterating that the Russians are required by law to interview the Skripals personally and directly to confirm their status and wishes.
The questioner hectored the ambassador with the point that Yulia Skripal had released statements through the police indicating that she, at least, did not wish to meet personally with Russian officials because she was afraid to do so.
Ambassador Yakovenko, also as usual, patiently– and a bit too diffidently– explained that a third-party statement is not the same as first-hand communication. I get it– he’s a “real” diplomat, not like the whacked-out modern Western berserker-diplomats. So he’s not about to tear this bumptious idiot’s head off.
But I wanted to scream. This is the way pernicious factoids work. Everybody in that room was at least willing to pretend that yeah, OK, Yulia actually did give the police that statement. Or a statement. Probably. But hmmm, if one really stops and thinks about it, everything the public has been told about the circumstances of the, er, events comes from official sources and/or highly-compromised and untrustworthy mass-media organizations.
So, the ostensibly remarkable development of Sergei Skripal’s recovery from a “military-grade nerve agent” just circles around the disinformation/memory hole. And, since these virtual “developments” are largely fact-free, the stories usually pad out the minimal “news” by revisiting and reiterating the same festering gutpile of pernicious factoids we’ve been sorting through for months: the supposed doorknob-smearing, the peculiar aspects of the “poisoning”, etc.
End of rant, but only because my ” key is overheating and seizing up. 😉
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Bonus Fun Fact: I was curious about the context of Churchill’s “riddle” quote, so I looked it up. According to the “Phrase Finder” website, it was uttered during an October, 1939 radio broadcast: “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!
Posted by: Ort | May 20 2018 18:54 utc | 12
In following one of b’s links to the “American Thinker” site (and several other good articles there on the Halper story by the way) I chanced on the following article:
How Guilty Were Ordinary Citizens in Germany?
The article itself is remarkably hypocritical, shallow, disingenuous and self-contradictory, but what makes it really fascinating is the parallels between ordinary people in the USA today and ordinary Germans in Germany under the Nazi regime. The author, Michael Curtis, is completely oblivious to these parallels.
In Curtis’s own words (with the appropriate substitutions), “The controversial issues remain: what did [Americans] know of the terror, the discrimination, and the [genocide in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, and in the future perhaps Iran and Korea … and if we go back a little further Indonesia, North and South Korea, and so many many other countries] by [Neocon/Neoliberal USA]? Did they approve, oppose, or remain silent?”
Despite the article’s massive deficiencies I can recommend reading it for the issues it raises (blindly and unknowingly!) about personal and collectively responsibility in the modern day USA. (Recommended for those thinking more deeply than the shallow words of the text itself!)
For the last 70 years people have debated about the personal responsibilities of ordinary Germany during the Nazi period for what took place there (no mention in the article by the way of the genocide of Russians in Nazi concentration camps, nor of the genocide of Jews by the Ukrainian Nazis, nor of the genocide of the ethnic Polish minority and others in Ukraine by the Ukrainian Nazis – how convenient!).
For the next 70 years people around the world will be debating in the same way (both rationally and irrationally, biased and unbiased, fairly and unfairly, based on evidence and based on distortion – but perhaps also one overriding bias either one way or the other just as the last 70 years’ analysis was biased) about the personal responsibility of ordinary Americans for the crimes committed by the “one exceptional nation” during the last 70 years against defenseless civilians in hundreds of countries around the world, and indeed against the blacks, the poor, and other defenseless minorities (and majority, even?) in the USA itself.
Curiously the examples Curtis cites of the “personal responsibility” of “ordinary Germans” such as the transport of holocaust victims by Deutsche Bahn or the murder of 38,000 Jews in Poland by Reserve Police Battalion 101 are hardly fair examples of “ordinary Germans”. When he does cite memoirs of a 1920’s born cohort of (presumably) “ordinary Germans” despite blithely mentioning memoirs dominated by “struggling to lead normal lives in a setting of forces threatening death and destruction” … “Germans overwhelmingly experienced broken lives, a mixture of suffering and happiness, in the 20th century. In their narratives, the central vortex is the Nazi dictatorship, World War II, and the Holocaust. All disclaim any personal responsibility. They tell of terror at home and at the military front, life in bomb shelters, mass rape, flight and expulsion due to German aggression.”
I haven’t read the book in question (on the memoirs of the 1920’s cohort), but the way Curtis then seems to imply that the average German Hausfrau struggling to survive the ordeals of war in Dresden or the average young German man whatever particular lot befell him are personally responsible for the murders by the Reserve Police Battalion 101 or for the transport of German Jews by Deutsche Bahn is mind boggling – and rather reminiscent of the current Russiagate accusations actually.
Curtis fails to raise the more real questions of personal and collective responsibility – in the US case how most ordinary Americans by accepting the dogma of the “exceptional nation”, the praise for the US military and police, and in believing the often absurd and contradictory lies of the regime and of the mass media, are supporting the capacity of the regime to continue its malevolent ways.
And so too for the vassal states of the US – for example when a Dutchman expresses confidence in the blatantly compromised Dutch investigation into MH17 to what extent is he indirectly enabling and assisting the lack of accountability for that mass murder and for the corrupt coverup?
For those who look beyond the shallow words of Michael Curtis and who concentrate on what is missing from the article rather than what is there, the issues thereby raised are as immense and profound as the ocean.
Maybe in 70 years’ time Michael Curtis’s counterpart in some other country will write a similarly disingenuous article about the “ordinary Americans” – did they bear collective responsibility for the genocide of retreating Iraqi soldiers on the Highway of Death in 1991, or the torturing of prisoners in Guantanamo and in CIA black sites around the world, or the mass genocide committed against North Korea in the 1950’s, or the genocide against children through sanctions against Iraq or other countries?
In the next 70 years there will surely be a disingenuous bias in the reckoning, for that is unfortunately a habitual feature of human societies. Which way the bias will go depends largely on which group manages to monopolise control of the history.
Posted by: BM | May 21 2018 12:38 utc | 71
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