Chinese president Xi Jinping has vowed for the first time that China should take the lead in shaping the “new world order” and safeguarding international security, one of the latest moves putting him in stark contrast to Donald Trump and the US president’s “America First” policy.
Xi had on numerous occasions called for China to play an important part in building the new world order. But during a Feb. 17 national security seminar in Beijing, he indicated China should “guide” the international community in the effort. A Feb. 20 commentary (link in Chinese) by the Chinese Communist Party’s central party school, which trains officials, noted the distinction. It has since been widely shared by state-controlled media.
News outlets dubbed Xi’s new approach the “Two Guides” (两个引导) policy, with the “two” referring to the new world order and international security. (China has an obsession with silly-sounding numbered policies.)
“The overall trend of world multi-polarization, economic globalization, and democratization of international relations remains unchanged. We should guide the international community to jointly build a more just and reasonable new world order,” Xi was paraphrased by Xinhua (link in Chinese) as saying during last week’s seminar. In another paragraph, the state newswire paraphrased Xi as saying “We should guide the international community to jointly maintain international security.”
Xi’s new proposal has “profound meaning,” as his speech coincided with the annual Munich Security Conference and the G20 finance ministerial meeting, noted the commentary. It added that the Western-dominated world order is near its end as Western countries are showing less willingness and ability to interfere in global affairs—as evidenced by Trump’s isolationist foreign policy.
Xi attended the seminar as head of the National Security Commission, a secretive party organ set up in 2014. Until last week, the body had held just one publicly reported meeting since its establishment. The latest seminar came ahead of the party’s 19th congress, a major leadership reshuffle event slated for this fall.
Since Trump’s election China has emerged as the world’s strongest proponent of globalization. In the past few months, Xi has been busy sending the world messages that are the exact opposite of Trump’s.
As Trump promised to tear up the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Xi touted his alternative Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, including at last November’s APEC summit, right in the US’s backyard.
As Trump threatened to close the borders and back away from global affairs, Xi rebuked Trump—without mentioning his name—in his keynote speech at the 2017 World Economic Forum in January. As Trump pressed to curb immigration, Xi called to make it easier for foreigners to get Chinese green cards.
Xi and Trump appear aligned on one issue: the press. As Trump denounced the media as the “enemy of the American people,” China’s state-controlled media marked the first anniversary (link in Chinese) of Xi’s talk demanding “absolute loyalty” from the press—an idea that Trump, it would seem, could get behind.
IN JANUARY 1961, Dwight Eisenhower delivered his farewell address after serving two terms as U.S. president; the five-star general chose to warn Americans of this specific threat to democracy: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” That warning was issued prior to the decadelong escalation of the Vietnam War, three more decades of Cold War mania, and the post-9/11 era, all of which radically expanded that unelected faction’s power even further.
This is the faction that is now engaged in open warfare against the duly elected and already widely disliked president-elect, Donald Trump. They are using classic Cold War dirty tactics and the defining ingredients of what has until recently been denounced as “Fake News.”
Their most valuable instrument is the U.S. media, much of which reflexively reveres, serves, believes, and sides with hidden intelligence officials. And Democrats, still reeling from their unexpected and traumatic election loss, as well as a systemic collapse of their party, seemingly divorced further and further from reason with each passing day, are willing — eager — to embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with any villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry, and damaging those behaviors might be.
The serious dangers posed by a Trump presidency are numerous and manifest. There is a wide array of legitimate and effective tactics for combating those threats: from bipartisan congressional coalitions and constitutional legal challenges to citizen uprisings and sustained and aggressive civil disobedience. All of those strategies have periodically proven themselves effective in times of political crisis or authoritarian overreach.
But cheering for the CIA and its shadowy allies to unilaterally subvert the U.S. election and impose its own policy dictates on the elected president is both warped and self-destructive. Empowering the very entities that have produced the most shameful atrocities and systemic deceit over the last six decades is desperation of the worst kind. Demanding that evidence-free, anonymous assertions be instantly venerated as Truth — despite emanating from the very precincts designed to propagandize and lie — is an assault on journalism, democracy, and basic human rationality. And casually branding domestic adversaries who refuse to go along as traitors and disloyal foreign operatives is morally bankrupt and certain to backfire on those doing it.
Beyond all that, there is no bigger favor that Trump opponents can do for him than attacking him with such lowly, shabby, obvious shams, recruiting large media outlets to lead the way. When it comes time to expose actual Trump corruption and criminality, who is going to believe the people and institutions who have demonstrated they are willing to endorse any assertions no matter how factually baseless, who deploy any journalistic tactic no matter how unreliable and removed from basic means of ensuring accuracy?
All of these toxic ingredients were on full display yesterday as the Deep State unleashed its tawdriest and most aggressive assault yet on Trump: vesting credibility in and then causing the public disclosure of a completely unvetted and unverified document, compiled by a paid, anonymous operative while he was working for both GOP and Democratic opponents of Trump, accusing Trump of a wide range of crimes, corrupt acts, and salacious private conduct. The reaction to all of this illustrates that while the Trump presidency poses grave dangers, so, too, do those who are increasingly unhinged in their flailing, slapdash, and destructive attempts to undermine it.
FOR MONTHS, THE CIA, with unprecedented clarity, overtly threw its weight behind Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and sought to defeat Donald Trump. In August, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell announced his endorsement of Clinton in the New York Times and claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” The CIA and NSA director under George W. Bush, Gen. Michael Hayden, also endorsed Clinton and went to the Washington Post to warn, in the week before the election, that “Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin,” adding that Trump is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”
It is not hard to understand why the CIA preferred Clinton over Trump. Clinton was critical of Obama for restraining the CIA’s proxy war in Syria and was eager to expand that war, while Trump denounced it. Clinton clearly wanted a harder line than Obama took against the CIA’s long-standing foes in Moscow, while Trump wanted improved relations and greater cooperation. In general, Clinton defended and intended to extend the decadeslong international military order on which the CIA and Pentagon’s preeminence depends, while Trump — through a still-uncertain mix of instability and extremist conviction — posed a threat to it.
Whatever one’s views are on those debates, it is the democratic framework — the presidential election, the confirmation process, congressional leaders, judicial proceedings, citizen activism and protest, civil disobedience — that should determine how they are resolved. All of those policy disputes were debated out in the open; the public heard them; and Trump won. Nobody should crave the rule of Deep State overlords.
Yet craving Deep State rule is exactly what prominent Democratic operatives and media figures are doing. Any doubt about that is now dispelled. Just last week, Chuck Schumer issued a warning to Trump, telling Rachel Maddow that Trump was being “really dumb” by challenging the unelected intelligence community because of all the ways they possess to destroy those who dare to stand up to them:
And last night, many Democrats openly embraced and celebrated what was, so plainly, an attempt by the Deep State to sabotage an elected official who had defied it: ironically, its own form of blackmail.
BACK IN OCTOBER, a political operative and former employee of the British intelligence agency MI6 was being paid by Democrats to dig up dirt on Trump (before that, he was paid by anti-Trump Republicans). He tried to convince countless media outlets to publish a long memo he had written filled with explosive accusations about Trump’s treason, business corruption, and sexual escapades, with the overarching theme that Trump was in servitude to Moscow because they were blackmailing and bribing him.
Despite how many had it, no media outlets published it. That was because these were anonymous claims unaccompanied by any evidence at all, and even in this more permissive new media environment, nobody was willing to be journalistically associated with it. As the New York Times’ Executive Editor Dean Baquet put it last night, he would not publish these “totally unsubstantiated” allegations because “we, like others, investigated the allegations and haven’t corroborated them, and we felt we’re not in the business of publishing things we can’t stand by.”
The closest this operative got to success was convincing Mother Jones’s David Corn to publish an October 31 article reporting that “a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country” claims that “he provided the [FBI] with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump.”
But because this was just an anonymous claim unaccompanied by any evidence or any specifics (which Corn withheld), it made very little impact. All of that changed yesterday. Why?
What changed was the intelligence community’s resolution to cause this all to become public and to be viewed as credible. In December, John McCain provided a copy of this report to the FBI and demanded they take it seriously.
At some point last week, the chiefs of the intelligence agencies decided to declare that this ex-British intelligence operative was “credible” enough that his allegations warranted briefing both Trump and Obama about them, thus stamping some sort of vague, indirect, and deniable official approval on these accusations. Someone — by all appearances, numerous officials — then went to CNN to tell the network they had done this, causing CNN to go on air and, in the gravest of tones, announce the “Breaking News” that “the nation’s top intelligence officials” briefed Obama and Trump that Russia had compiled information that “compromised President-elect Trump.”
CNN refused to specify what these allegations were on the ground that it could not “verify” them. But with this document in the hands of multiple media outlets, it was only a matter of time — a small amount of time — before someone would step up and publish the whole thing. BuzzFeed quickly obliged, airing all of the unvetted, anonymous claims about Trump.
Its editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, published a memo explaining that decision, saying that — although there was “serious reason to doubt the allegations” — BuzzFeed in general “errs on the side of publication” and “Americans can make up their own minds about the allegations.” Publishing this document predictably produced massive traffic (and thus profit) for the site, with millions of people viewing the article and presumably reading the “dossier.”
One can certainly object to BuzzFeed’s decision and, as the New York Times noted this morning, many journalists are doing so. It’s almost impossible to imagine a scenario where it’s justifiable for a news outlet to publish a totally anonymous, unverified, unvetted document filled with scurrilous and inflammatory allegations about which its own editor-in-chief says there “is serious reason to doubt the allegations,” on the ground that they want to leave it to the public to decide whether to believe it.
But even if one believes there is no such case where that is justified, yesterday’s circumstances presented the most compelling scenario possible for doing this. Once CNN strongly hinted at these allegations, it left it to the public imagination to conjure up the dirt Russia allegedly had to blackmail and control Trump. By publishing these accusations, BuzzFeed ended that speculation. More importantly, it allowed everyone to see how dubious this document is, one the CIA and CNN had elevated into some sort of grave national security threat.
ALMOST IMMEDIATELY AFTER it was published, the farcical nature of the “dossier” manifested. Not only was its author anonymous, but he was paid by Democrats (and, before that, by Trump’s GOP adversaries) to dig up dirt on Trump. Worse, he himself cited no evidence of any kind but instead relied on a string of other anonymous people in Russia he claims told him these things. Worse still, the document was filled with amateur errors.
While many of the claims are inherently unverified, some can be confirmed. One such claim — that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen secretly traveled to Prague in August to meet with Russian officials — was strongly denied by Cohen, who insisted he had never been to Prague in his life (Prague is the same place that foreign intelligence officials claimed, in 2001, was the site of a nonexistent meeting between Iraqi officials and 9/11 hijackers, which contributed to 70 percent of Americans believing, as late as the fall of 2003, that Saddam personally planned the 9/11 attack). This morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that “the FBI has found no evidence that [Cohen] traveled to the Czech Republic.”
None of this stopped Democratic operatives and prominent media figures from treating these totally unverified and unvetted allegations as grave revelations. From Vox’s Zack Beauchamp:
BuzzFeed’s Borzou Daragahi posted a long series of tweets discussing the profound consequences of these revelations, only occasionally remembering to insert the rather important journalistic caveat “if true” in his meditations:
Meanwhile, liberal commentator Rebecca Solnit declared this to be a “smoking gun” that proves Trump’s “treason,” while Daily Kos’s Markos Moulitsas sounded the same theme:
While some Democrats sounded notes of caution — party loyalist Josh Marshall commendably urged: “I would say in reviewing raw, extremely raw ‘intel,’ people shld retain their skepticism even if they rightly think Trump is the worst” — the overwhelming reaction was the same as all the other instances where the CIA and its allies released unverified claims about Trump and Russia: instant embrace of the evidence-free assertions as Truth, combined with proclamations that they demonstrated Trump’s status as a traitor (with anyone expressing skepticism designated a Kremlin agent or stooge).
THERE IS A real danger here that this maneuver could harshly backfire, to the great benefit of Trump and to the great detriment of those who want to oppose him. If any of the significant claims in this “dossier” turn out to be provably false — such as Cohen’s trip to Prague — many people will conclude, with Trump’s encouragement, that large media outlets (CNN and BuzzFeed) and anti-Trump factions inside the government (CIA) are deploying “Fake News” to destroy him. In the eyes of many people, that will forever discredit — render impotent — future journalistic exposés that are based on actual, corroborated wrongdoing.
Beyond that, the threat posed by submitting ourselves to the CIA and empowering it to reign supreme outside of the democratic process is — as Eisenhower warned — an even more severe danger. The threat of being ruled by unaccountable and unelected entities is self-evident and grave. That’s especially true when the entity behind which so many are rallying is one with a long and deliberate history of lying, propaganda, war crimes, torture, and the worst atrocities imaginable.
All of the claims about Russia’s interference in U.S. elections and ties to Trump should be fully investigated by a credible body, and the evidence publicly disclosed to the fullest extent possible. As my colleague Sam Biddle argued last week after disclosure of the farcical intelligence community report on Russian hacking — one that even Putin’s foes mocked as a bad joke — the utter lack of evidence for these allegations means “we need an independent, resolute inquiry.” But until then, assertions that are unaccompanied by evidence and disseminated anonymously should be treated with the utmost skepticism — not lavished with convenience-driven gullibility.
Most important of all, the legitimate and effective tactics for opposing Trump are being utterly drowned by these irrational, desperate, ad hoc crusades that have no cogent strategy and make his opponents appear increasingly devoid of reason and gravity. Right now, Trump’s opponents are behaving as media critic Adam Johnson described: as ideological jellyfish, floating around aimlessly and lost, desperately latching on to whatever barge randomly passes by.
There are solutions to Trump. They involve reasoned strategizing and patient focus on issues people actually care about. Whatever those solutions are, venerating the intelligence community, begging for its intervention, and equating its dark and dirty assertions as Truth are most certainly not among them. Doing that cannot possibly achieve any good and is already doing much harm.
When Barack Obama takes to the lectern to deliver his farewell address in Chicago on Tuesday, he’ll likely have a few things to say about a political climate that has grown viciously polarized over the past 8 years and culminated in a bruising, insult-driven campaign in 2016. If he does call out the destructive effects of hyper-partisanship on our democracy, he will be following in the footsteps of the first farewell address, by George Washington, printed in the American Daily Advertiser on September 19, 1796.
Washington warned of the dangers of political factions to democratic republics throughout history. His aversion to partisanship reflected the fact that just a few decades earlier, in 1746, political parties had driven England to civil war. This first farewell address, from our only truly independent president, hearkens back to an agewhen distrust of political divisions was perhaps higher than it is now—and offers a solution to what ails us today.
“I was no party man myself,” Washington wrote Thomas Jefferson,“and the first wish of my heart was, if parties did exist, to reconcile them.” As our first and only independent president, Washington’s independence was a function not only of his pioneering place in American history but also of political principles he developed over a lifetime.
To Washington, moderation was a source of strength. He viewed its essential judiciousness as a guiding principle of good government, rooted in ancient wisdom as well as Enlightenment-era liberalism. Much could be achieved “by prudence, much by conciliation, and much by firmness.” A stable, civil society depends on resisting intolerant extremes. The Constitution did not mention political parties, and during the debate over ratification, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton praised the Constitution’s “spirit of moderation” in contrast to the “intolerant spirit” of “those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right in any controversy.”
Washington was nonpartisan but he was not neutral. He was decisive after consulting differing opinions. “He seeks information from all quarters, and judges more independently than any man I ever knew,” attested Vice President John Adams.
Washington understood the danger of demagogues in a democracy. He was a passionate advocate of moderation as a means of calming partisan passions and creating problem-solving coalitions. Adams also believed that “without the great political virtues of humility, patience, and moderation … every man in power becomes a ravenous beast of prey.”
And it was a source of personal pain for Washington to see his Cabinet degenerate into exaggerated suspicions and vicious slanders during his presidency. Most frustrating was to watch his motives twisted and attacked for partisan gain by “infamous scribblers” in the newspapers. Even in the days after winning independence from Britain, Washington warned of the dangerous interplay between extremes. “There is a natural and necessary progression from the extreme of anarchy to the extreme of tyranny,” he wrote in his Circular Letter to the States, and “arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.” As liberty in France turned to anarchy and then tyranny during his administration, it confirmed his deepest instincts.
As a young man, Washington devoured the popular early-eighteenth century essays of Joseph Addison in the Spectator of London. Addison was the author of his favorite play, Cato, and while reflecting on the sources of England’s bloody civil war in the 1640s, he had written an influential essay on “the Malice of Parties.” It’s worth quoting at length: “There cannot a greater judgment befall a country than a dreadful spirit of division as rends a government into two distinct people, and makes them greater strangers, and more averse to one another, than if they were actually two different nations. The effects of such a division are pernicious to the last degree, not only with regard to those advantages which they give the common enemy, but to those private evils which they produce in the heart of almost every particular person. This influence is very fatal both to men’s morals and their understandings; it sinks the virtue of a nation, and not only so, but destroys even common sense. A furious party spirit, when it rages in its full violence, exerts itself in civil war and bloodshed; and when it is under its greatest restraints, naturally breaks out in falsehood, detraction, calumny, and a partial administration of justice. In a word, it fills a nation with spleen and rancor, and extinguishes all the seeds of good nature, compassion and humanity.”
Addison was not the only wise voice warning the revolutionary generation against the danger of hyper-partisanship. The English poet Alexander Pope declared that party spirit “is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.” The early 18th-century British opposition leader Henry St. John, 1st Viscount of Bolingbroke, described parties as “a political evil.” Informed by experience in both journalism and politics, Bolingbroke wrote that “a man who has not seen the inside of parties, nor had opportunities to examine nearly their secret motives, can hardly conceive how little share principle of any sort, though principle of some sort or other be always pretended, has in the determination of their conduct.”
The founding fathers’ suspicion of faction was rooted in the classical tradition that celebrated the virtue of moderation—and the subsequent independence of thought and action that moderation can create. “According to the classical doctrine, membership in a political party inevitably involved defending the indefensible vices of one’s allies and attempting to dominate one’s fellow citizens in order to satisfy a narrow self-interest,” wrote historian Carl J. Richard in The Founders and the Classics in 1994. “In the eighteenth century the greatest compliment one man could pay another was to call him ‘disinterested.’ To be disinterested was to place justice above all considerations, including one’s own interests and those of one’s family, friends and political allies.”
Throughout his career in Virginia’s House of Burgesses and as president of the Constitutional Convention, Washington took labors to remain in the role of moderate. In his twenties, while serving in the Virginia legislature, when the House of Burgesses was divided between moderates and militants in their resistance to the British royals, Washington played a pivotal role by bridging the divides with personal diplomacy, dining with leaders of the different factions.
During the war, there was no political will to raise revenue to pay the soldiers. Washington’s frustration with the weak and fractured Congress helped form his belief that a strong central government led by an honest, energetic executive was essential to a successful democracy.
Amid “the want of harmony in our councils—the declining zeal of the people,” Washington wrote his friend Gouverneur Morris, “it is well worth the ambition of a patriot statesman at this juncture to endeavor to pacify party differences—to give fresh vigor to the springs of government—to inspire the people with confidence.”
Washington’s call for a “patriot statesman” echoed Bolingbroke’s call for a “Patriot King” in a widely read 1749 pamphlet that articulated an antidote to the corruption and fanaticism of parties that led to England’s civil war. For Bolingbroke, the ideal was a benign monarch who could “defeat the designs, and break the spirit of faction” in a parliamentary democracy, toward the goal of delivering “true principles of government independent of all.” Washington’s substitution of “statesman” for “king” reframed the concept for an American audience. The ideal of a strong leader who operated beyond partisanship retained its attractiveness.
When Washington became president, he intended to establish a government above faction and special interests. “No local prejudices or attachments; no separate views, nor party animosities,” he promised in his first inaugural address, “will misdirect the comprehensive and equal eye which ought to watch over this great assemblage of communities and interests.”
Washington did not want or expect unanimity of opinion in his Cabinet, perhaps reflecting the idea that in a place where everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking very much. He was aware of his limits on specific issues—especially law and finance. A competition of ideas and opinions was something to be celebrated, as he made clear in a letter to the governor of North Carolina two months after taking the oath of office: “A difference of opinion on political points is not to be imputed to freemen as a fault, since it is to be presumed that they are all actuated by an equally laudable and sacred regard for the liberties of their country.”
But as Washington preached an enlightened self-interest consistent with classical liberalism, dissension grew in his Cabinet ranks, as political divisions hardened and suspicions drove onetime allies apart. He was always aware that these fault lines could rupture the fragile federal government.
“My greatest fear has been that the nation would not be sufficiently cool and moderate in making arrangements for the security of that liberty,” he wrote after nine months in office. “If we mean to support the liberty and independence which it has cost us so much blood and treasure to establish,” he wrote to Rhode Island governor Arthur Fenner, “we must drive far away the demon of party spirit and local reproach.”
In the spring of 1796, when he picked back up the first draft of his farewell address, which Washington had asked Madison to draft in his first term, Washington added new language explaining to the public that given the “considerable changes … both at home and abroad, I shall ask your indulgence while I express with more lively sensibility the following most ardent wishes of my heart.”
The next line in the draft drove right to the rise of faction: “That party disputes among all the friends and lovers of their country may subside, or, as the wisdom of Providence hath ordained that men, on the same subjects, shall not always think alike, that charity and benevolence, when they happen to differ, may so far shed their benign influence as to banish those invectives which proceed from illiberal prejudices and jealousy.”
In a line he deleted from the final draft, Washington went even further, warning that in a large republic, a military coup was unlikely to undermine democracy, even if backed by the wealthy and powerful. The base of the country was too broad. “In such republics,” he said, “it is safe to assert that the conflicts of popular factions are the chief, if not the only, inlets of usurpation and tyranny.”
Washington acknowledged that the spirit of party “unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments.” But he understood partisans’ perspective, stating plainly, “there is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true.”
Beyond those wise limits, Washington warned, rampant factions were a “fatal tendency” in democracies. The thin history of republics up to that point showed that partisan factions led by “cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men” distorted democracies by pursuing narrow agendas at the expense of the national interest. Washington identified regional parties based on “geographical discriminations” as a particular danger, because they undermined national unity in pursuit of power. “Designing men may endeavor to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views” by misrepresenting the “opinions and aims” of people from other states and regions. “You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations,” Washington warned. “They tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.”
But the greatest danger could spring from the chaos of a dysfunctional democracy, compounded by relentless party warfare, which, Washington warned, would erode faith in the effectiveness of self-governance and open the door to a demagogue with authoritarian ambitions. “The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”
Washington’s remedy was modest but comprehensive: Partisanship could not be removed from democracy, but it could be constrained by vigilant citizens and the sober-minded separation of powers. “The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it,” Washington wrote. Doubling down for emphasis, he added that “there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it.”
For Washington, this wise balance was the prime pillar of our political liberty. By devoting so much of his farewell address to warning about the dangers of hyper-partisanship, Washington penned a manifesto for moderation, a guide for future leaders and citizens who would try to walk the line between the extremes, focused on the never-ending task of forming a more perfect union.
Now, in 2017, after an eight-year presidency that promised to bridge our divides but confronted the political reality of polarization and the election of a successor whose victory has highlighted the deep divisions in America, Washington’s vision for vigorous citizens checking the rise of extreme partisanship is striking in its relevance. We need to heed Washington’s warning.
The founder of the transparency organization WikiLeaks released a statement on 1 December upon the release of over 500,000 diplomatic cables dating back to 1979, which succinctly reveals how the CIA was essentially responsible for creating the Islamic State (ISIS) terror group.
The timing of the release coincided with the sixth anniversary of WikiLeaks “Cablegate” release, which exposed the machinations of the underbelly of the U.S. empire. The latest release, known as the “Carter Cables,” adds 531,525 new diplomatic cables to the WikiLeaks’ already voluminous Public Library of U.S. Diplomacy (PLUSD).
In a statement released in concert with the release of the “Carter Cables,” Julian Assange mapped out how the events of 1979 began a series of events that have ultimately culminated in the rise of ISIS.
“If any year could be said to be the “year zero” of our modern era, 1979 is it,” said Assange.
Assange lays bare the reality that the roots of modern Islamist terrorism began through a joint venture by the CIA and Saudi Arabian government, to the tune of billions of dollars, to create a “Mujahideen” force to fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan – which ultimately led to the creation of al-Qaeda.
Assange is not alone in his claims either. According to a poll by the Express, the overwhelming majority of people understand that US foreign policy created ISIS.
Assange goes on to note that the subsequent attacks of 9/11, and invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, directly led to the rise of ISIS.
“In the Middle East, the Iranian revolution, the Saudi Islamic uprising and the Egypt-Israel Camp David Accords led not only to the present regional power dynamic but decisively changed the relationship between oil, militant Islam and the world.
“The uprising at Mecca permanently shifted Saudi Arabia towards Wahhabism, leading to the transnational spread of Islamic fundamentalism and the US-Saudi destabilisation of Afghanistan,” said Assange.
The narrative laid out by Assange exposes exactly how militant Islam was nurtured by the CIA and Saudi government as a mean of usurping the communist Afghani government, which had asked for Soviet assistance in combatting Islamic terrorism.
“The invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR would see Saudi Arabia and the CIA push billions of dollars to Mujahideen fighters as part of Operation Cyclone, fomenting the rise of al-Qaeda and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.
“The 1979 current of Islamification spread to Pakistan where the US embassy was burned to the ground and Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed.
“The Iranian hostage crisis would go on to fatally undermine Jimmy Carter’s presidency and see the election of Ronald Reagan.
“The rise of al-Qaeda eventually bore the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, enabling the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and over a decade of war, leaving, at its end, the ideological, financial and geographic basis for ISIS,” said Assange.
In addition to the rise of global militant Islam, the latest release also includes cables regarding the election of Margaret Thatcher as British Prime Minister. Three Mile Island nuclear incident is also covered as well as cables highlighting Henry Kissinger secretly working with David Rockefeller to find a place for the deposed Shah of Iran to hide.
“In 1979 it seemed as if the blood would never stop,” noted Assange. “Dozens of countries saw assassinations, coups, revolts, bombings, political kidnappings and wars of liberation.”
With the release of the “Carter Cables,” WikiLeaks’ has now published a total of 3.3 million U.S. diplomatic cables. Staying true to their motto – WikiLeaks continues to open up governments.
Below is a video interview with Assange where he highlights an email from the Podesta leak, which exposed that the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar are directly funding ISIS. In that email, sent on August 17, 2014, Hillary Clinton asked John Podesta to help put “pressure” on the Qatari and Saudi Arabian governments over their support of ISIS. State sponsorship of ISIS, by what is generally considered a close ally of the United States, is something that U.S. officials continue to refuse to acknowledge publicly.
Hillary Clinton’s email to Podesta reveals clearly the reality of the situation.
“We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region,” Clinton wrote in the email.
Editor’s Note: Thought it would be interesting to go back almost four years and post this election 2016 article about how the media was already distorting the news after Trump became the duly elected President of the United States. The mainstream media, left/liberal or otherwise, always has a political agenda (not a journalistic one) to serve their corporate/elite masters. These media distortions, and their pursuit of “fake news”, aligns only with their preordained narrative. This has left the mainstream media with no credibility whatsoever.
By Tom Basile
It’s been a little more than a month since an election that was the kind of seismic event in our politics that only happens once a century. It sent shock waves through the national political establishment and pretty much any other group of prognosticators that had been banking on an easy Clinton win. No one felt the sting more than the mainstream media. The morning after the election, anchors and columnists were making a collective stammering Act of Contrition about just how “wrong” they were about the election – and the electorate.
But in the month since, the so-called mainstream media have, as if in coordinated fashion, executed a transparent strategy to bludgeon the president-elect at every turn. Republicans, Conservatives, Independents and the majority of Americans who actually want to give Donald Trump a chance to lead will likely see through this anti-Trump propaganda campaign, but perhaps a review of their strategy is instructive at this point.
Media outlets have again shown they are doubling down on the same strategy that has driven their own approval ratings close to – dare I say – Congressional territory. That’s right. Survey after survey finds the same media that has made beating up conservatives, Republicans and religious institutions an industry has seen their tactics boomerang on them. Even actor Denzel Washington blasted the media last week saying that, “One of the effects of “too much information is the need to be first, not even to be true anymore.”
Hope for better isn’t a strategy and change isn’t coming. Here’s the anti-Trump plan of attack in all its banality. Some of these elements will have a shelf life. Some will be part of a prolonged effort. The strategy has several key components that have quickly taken shape over the last few weeks.
First, they are advancing a strategy of attempting to tie the president-elect and his team to the so-called “alt-right” and neo-Nazi, white supremacist lunatics. Despite Trump and his transition team issuing multiple statements denouncing the activities of a number of groups, the media still provided hours of coverage to small pockets of hate groups that used the election as a recruiting tool.
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A sub-component to this was advancing a message that the country was in turmoil in the days after the election because of widespread protests against the newly-elected president. Even Fox News put a graphic on the screen that proclaimed there was “Anarchy in America.” Again, more sensationalized information that only bares a faint resemblance to the truth.
Yes, there were protests in a number of cities as well as sit-ins and cry-ins on college campuses filled with whiny young people who have little grasp on the realities of life. But to suggest that there is widespread discontent and a surge in the size, number and strength of hate groups in this country who are supposedly empowered by the Trump campaign or aligned with the president-elect is nonsense. Incidents that qualify as hate crimes, like racist graffiti did spike after the election, but a real, honest analysis of these events will show that a sustained, coordinated grassroots movement against American pluralistic values and racial tolerance is not developing.
This is what happens when you try to stretch 10 minutes of news into 24 hours of coverage.
Third, the press have pushed several key messages to delegitamize the president-elect. Let’s take them in order. First, the media is aggressively driving the narrative that Trump didn’t win the popular vote. This part of the playbook was dusted off from George W. Bush’s 2000 election. Of course the big brains in the media never mention to their readers and viewers the simple fact that the Electoral College – whatever you might think about it – dictates the strategy of national elections. If you ran a popular vote strategy, you’d run a completely different campaign in terms of allocation of time and resources. The game is not winning the popular vote, like it or not.
Further, there is no evidence that had the campaigns executed a popular vote strategy that Clinton would have won. Actually to the contrary, given the marked enthusiasm deficit on the Democrat side, Trump would likely have mobilized more voters from his states than Clinton would have in hers. Also, keep in mind that Clinton did have a robust turnout operation in key urban and suburban districts where she needed to perform well with her base. She still under-performed in those places that also would have been critical to a popular vote victory.
The press has weaved the issue into the coverage repeatedly using the phony recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as an excuse to mention the popular vote margin. Naturally, they’ve spent little time acknowledging that Hillary Clinton lost or under-performed President Obama in almost every single demographic group that mattered – including women.
The second way they are seeking to delegitamize Trump is pushing the notion that something called “fake news” was actually the reason why Trump won the election. The “fake news” claim is perhaps the most offensive, but naturally many in the media have been tone deaf about it. “Fake news” is real. It is generated by websites, aggregators and email list-serves that blast out stories on social media and other online platforms of dubious credibility. We’ve all seen them. They specialize in click-bait for folks who feed off of red meat politics. Headlines like “Obama to ban Pledge of Allegiance,” or “Clinton Accused of Being Pedophile,” are the kinds of stories that drive traffic to these sites.
The mainstream news media would like people to believe that so many people actually thought enough of these stories were credible that the impact threw the election to Donald Trump.
Denial is a terrible thing. Even more so, what is highlighted by this strategy is their elitism and continuing disdain for the average person. Sure I often accuse politicians of all political stripes of underestimating the intelligence of the average voter, but this line of attack against the legitimacy of the election takes the cake. Whenever you read a “real news” story about “fake news” remember, the editors who decided to create space in news cycle for that piece think millions of Americans are just to dumb to realize when something is so outrageous, it can’t be all true. This attitude on the part of the media is, of course, an extension of their general political philosophy that suggests people are too stupid to make their own decisions about how big their soda should be or how much salt to use in their food. These are the same folks who believe that the government is the solution to all problems domestically and can do no right when it comes to foreign or military policy.
Finally, in recent days the idea that Russia, through electronic espionage and “fake news,” helped tip the scales in Trump’s favor is the latest method of not only de-legitimizing Trump but also suggesting that Trump is in some way a Manchurian Candidate who will be controlled by Vladimir Putin. No one should ever put anything past Putin, particularly after the Obama foreign policy has allowed his power and influence to grow unchecked. But to suggest that Clinton would have won, but for this alleged interference is as credible as, well, fake news.
Oh wait – I forgot the new charge that Trump’s appointment of former generals to several cabinet and senior posts is evidence of his desire to abrogate civilian leadership of the country and institute a full-scale militarization of the federal government. That was a new one over the last few days.
Then of course, are the photos and video clips intentionally curated and placed by editors in mainstream reporting that show Trump making silly, mean or grotesque faces. The media did this to Bush constantly. Back then the word in news rooms was to make him look as stupid and confused as possible in photos and video.
So a month after the feigned apologies for getting it all wrong, the media has telegraphed clearly their strategy for the next four years. Perhaps we should thank them for being so transparent. Like Democrats during the campaign who chose to talk more about transgender bathrooms than job creation for the middle class, the media that stretches to such lengths to hurt the incoming president may well continue to lose public support. For ordinary Americans just looking for real, balanced news and analysis, it looks like we’ll be out in the cold again.
For a director who customarily tackles subjects with the approach of a gorilla playing American football, Oliver Stone’s take on whistleblower Edward Snowden seems curiously muted. Audiences who are already familiar with Citizenfour, Laura Poitras’s exemplary documentary on the same subject, will be struck by the fact that, in dramatising Snowden’s story, Stone seems to have leached out much of the drama. The aim was clearly to create an All the President’s Men for the age of cyber-surveillance. But somehow the sense of peril is downplayed, diluted by too much inert exposition and pacing that could be tighter.
Playing Edward Snowden, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is one of the film’s main assets. His character’s ferocious intelligence is signposted with cheap details – he is forever fiddling with a Rubik’s cube and has a nerd’s enthusiasm for arcane enciphering equipment. But Snowden’s intellect is most effectively conveyed in Gordon-Levitt’s eyes – watchful, sober and clouded by doubt, they are a window into his impossible ethical quandary.
Melissa Leo is somewhat underused as Poitras. And playing Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, Zachary Quinto is tonally jarring. It feels as though Stone realised that some of the scenes were flagging, so got Quinto to shout angrily at random moments, to keep the audience on their toes.
There are some fun elements, many involving Rhys Ifans’s ruthlessly unprincipled CIA trainer Corbin O’Brian (the fact the character shares a surname with the villain of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is no accident). I particularly enjoyed a scene in which O’Brian’s massive glowering face is beamed into a conference room to berate Snowden. His carnivorous snarl fills the immense screen; he looks like a malevolent version of the Wizard of Oz. There’s a playful visual flair to this moment that is sadly lacking elsewhere in the film.
A silent war continues, led by the west, ignored by the media, writes John Pilger.
The American journalist, Edward Bernays, is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda.
The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psycho-analysis, it was Bernays who coined the term “public relations” as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions.
In 1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter Parade – behaviour then considered outlandish. One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!”
Bernays’ influence extended far beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing the American public to join the slaughter of the First World War. The secret, he said, was “engineering the consent” of people in order to “control and regiment [them]according to our will without their knowing about it”.
He described this as “the true ruling power in our society” and called it an “invisible government”.
Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood. In my career as a journalist and film-maker, I have never known propaganda to insinuate our lives as it does now, and to go unchallenged.
Imagine two cities. Both are under siege by the forces of the government of that country. Both cities are occupied by fanatics, who commit terrible atrocities, such as beheading people.
But there is a vital difference. In one siege, the government soldiers are described as liberators by Western reporters embedded with them, who enthusiastically report their battles and air strikes. There are front page pictures of these heroic soldiers giving a V-sign for victory. There is scant mention of civilian casualties.
(IMAGE: The U.S. Army, Flickr)
In the second city – in another country nearby – almost exactly the same thing is happening. Government forces are laying siege to a city controlled by the same breed of fanatics.
The difference is that these fanatics are supported, supplied and armed by “us” – by the United States and Britain. They even have a media centre that is funded by Britain and America.
Another difference is that the government soldiers laying siege to this city are the bad guys, condemned for assaulting and bombing the city – which is exactly what the good soldiers do in the first city.
Confusing? Not really. Such is the basic double standard that is the essence of propaganda. I am referring, of course, to the current siege of the city of Mosul by the government forces of Iraq, who are backed by the United States and Britain, and to the siege of Aleppo by the government forces of Syria, backed by Russia. One is good; the other is bad.
What is seldom reported is that both cities would not be occupied by fanatics and ravaged by war if Britain and the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003. That criminal enterprise was launched on lies strikingly similar to the propaganda that now distorts our understanding of the civil war in Syria.
Without this drumbeat of propaganda dressed up as news, the monstrous ISIS and Al-Qaida and al-Nusra and the rest of the jihadist gang might not exist, and the people of Syria might not be fighting for their lives today.
Some may remember in 2003 a succession of BBC reporters turning to the camera and telling us that Blair was “vindicated” for what turned out to be the crime of the century. The US television networks produced the same validation for George W. Bush. Fox News brought on Henry Kissinger to effuse over Colin Powell’s fabrications.
Former US president George W Bush (IMAGE: Peter Stevens, Flickr).
The same year, soon after the invasion, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the renowned American investigative journalist. I asked him, “What would have happened if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged what turned out to be crude propaganda?”
He replied that if journalists had done their job, “there is a very, very good chance we would not have gone to war in Iraq”.
It was a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question – Dan Rather of CBS, David Rose of the Observer and journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous.
In other words, had journalists done their job, had they challenged and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today, and there would be no ISIS and no siege of Aleppo or Mosul.
There would have been no atrocity on the London Underground on 7th July 2005. There would have been no flight of millions of refugees; there would be no miserable camps.
When the terrorist atrocity happened in Paris last November, President Francoise Hollande immediately sent planes to bomb Syria – and more terrorism followed, predictably, the product of Hollande’s bombast about France being “at war” and “showing no mercy”. That state violence and jihadist violence feed off each other is the truth that no national leader has the courage to speak.
“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”
The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each of these countries was not a puppet of the West. The human rights record of a Saddam or a Gaddafi was irrelevant. They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country.
The same fate awaited Slobodan Milosevic once he had refused to sign an “agreement” that demanded the occupation of Serbia and its conversion to a market economy. His people were bombed, and he was prosecuted in The Hague. Independence of this kind is intolerable.
As WikiLeaks has revealed, it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked.
From that moment, the CIA planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics – the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage.
Why is this not news? The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: “We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked.”
The West’s medieval client, Saudi Arabia – to which the US and Britain sell billions of dollars’ worth of arms – is at present destroying Yemen, a country so poor that in the best of times, half the children are malnourished.
Look on YouTube and you will see the kind of massive bombs – “our” bombs – that the Saudis use against dirt-poor villages, and against weddings, and funerals.
The explosions look like small atomic bombs. The bomb aimers in Saudi Arabia work side-by-side with British officers. This fact is not on the evening news.
Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education – Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia – and with careers on the BBC, theGuardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post.
These organisations are known as the liberal media. They present themselves as enlightened, progressive tribunes of the moral zeitgeist. They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT.
And they love war.
While they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny the rights of countless women, including the right to life.
In 2011, Libya, then a modern state, was destroyed on the pretext that Muammar Gaddafi was about to commit genocide on his own people. That was the incessant news; and there was no evidence. It was a lie.
An anti-Gaddafi rally, Libya 2011. (IMAGE: mojomogwai, Flickr)
In fact, Britain, Europe and the United States wanted what they like to call “regime change” in Libya, the biggest oil producer in Africa. Gaddafi’s influence in the continent and, above all, his independence were intolerable.
So he was murdered with a knife in his rear by fanatics, backed by America, Britain and France. Hillary Clinton cheered his gruesome death for the camera, declaring,
“We came, we saw, he died!”
The destruction of Libya was a media triumph. As the war drums were beaten, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian: “Though the risks are very real, the case for intervention remains strong.”
Intervention – what a polite, benign, Guardian word, whose real meaning, for Libya, was death and destruction.
According to its own records, Nato launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. Look at the photographs of the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. The Unicef report on the children killed says, “most [of them]under the age of 10”.
As a direct consequence, Sirte became the capital of ISIS.
Ukraine is another media triumph. Respectable liberal newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian, and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, NBC, CBS, CNN have played a critical role in conditioning their viewers to accept a new and dangerous cold war.
All have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia when, in fact, the coup in Ukraine in 2014 was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and Nato.
This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington’s military intimidation of Russia is not news; it is suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war. Once again, the Ruskies are coming to get us, led by another Stalin, whom The Economist depicts as the devil.
The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The fascists who engineered the coup in Kiev are the same breed that backed the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Of all the scares about the rise of fascist anti-Semitism in Europe, no leader ever mentions the fascists in Ukraine – except Vladimir Putin, but he does not count.
Russian president Vladimir Putin. (IMAGE: IoSonoUnaFotoCamera, Flickr).
Many in the Western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian-speaking population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, as agents of Moscow, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.
There is almost the joie d’esprit of a class reunion of warmongers. The drum-beaters of the Washington Post inciting war with Russia are the very same editorial writers who published the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
To most of us, the American presidential campaign is a media freak show, in which Donald Trump is the arch villain.
But Trump is loathed by those with power in the United States for reasons that have little to do with his obnoxious behaviour and opinions. To the invisible government in Washington, the unpredictable Trump is an obstacle to America’s design for the 21stcentury.
This is to maintain the dominance of the United States and to subjugate Russia, and, if possible, China.
To the militarists in Washington, the real problem with Trump is that, in his lucid moments, he seems not to want a war with Russia; he wants to talk with the Russian president, not fight him; he says he wants to talk with the president of China.
In the first debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump promised not to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into a conflict. He said, “I would certainly not do first strike. Once the nuclear alternative happens, it’s over.” That was not news.
Did he really mean it? Who knows? He often contradicts himself. But what is clear is that Trump is considered a serious threat to the status quo maintained by the vast national security machine that runs the United States, regardless of who is in the White House.
The CIA wants him beaten. The Pentagon wants him beaten. The media wants him beaten. Even his own party wants him beaten. He is a threat to the rulers of the world – unlike Clinton who has left no doubt she is prepared to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia and China.
US Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump. (IMAGE: Gage Skidmore, Flickr)
Clinton has the form, as she often boasts. Indeed, her record is proven. As a senator, she backed the bloodbath in Iraq. When she ran against Obama in 2008, she threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran. As Secretary of State, she colluded in the destruction of governments in Libya and Honduras and set in train the baiting of China.
She has now pledged to support a No Fly Zone in Syria — a direct provocation for war with Russia. Clinton may well become the most dangerous president of the United States in my lifetime –a distinction for which the competition is fierce.
Without a shred of evidence, she has accused Russia of supporting Trump and hacking her emails. Released by WikiLeaks, these emails tell us that what Clinton says in private, in speeches to the rich and powerful, is the opposite of what she says in public.
That is why silencing and threatening Julian Assange is so important. As the editor of WikiLeaks, Assange knows the truth. And let me assure those who are concerned, he is well, and WikiLeaks is operating on all cylinders.
Today, the greatest build-up of American-led forces since World War Two is under way – in the Caucasus and eastern Europe, on the border with Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, where China is the target.
Keep that in mind when the presidential election circus reaches its finale on November 8th, If the winner is Clinton, a Greek chorus of witless commentators will celebrate her coronation as a great step forward for women. None will mention Clinton’s victims: the women of Syria, the women of Iraq, the women of Libya. None will mention the civil defence drills being conducted in Russia. None will recall Edward Bernays’ “torches of freedom”.
George Bush’s press spokesman once called the media “complicit enablers”.
Coming from a senior official in an administration whose lies, enabled by the media, caused such suffering, that description is a warning from history.
In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: “Before every major aggression, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack. In the propaganda system, it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”
What do evil dictators look like? What do they talk like? Just how wicked is an evil dictator’s wife ? Should she be toppled along with her husband? Who am I talking about? President Assad of Syria and his wife, Asmas Al Assad.
These are the same ones boy Rubio, McCain, Lyndsay Graham, Ryan, the Bush’s, Obama, Kerry and Hillary all want to topple down to bring peace to Syria. That is THE LIE they are and have been shouting. What they really want to do is take over Syria in order to hurry along their New World Order agenda. The media whores push the establishment narrative that president Assad of Syria is evil and a corrupt dictator. They fear that when you realize who these people really are, you will be sorry you ever believed any lies told about them, let alone what they have conspired to do against them and all the citizens of Syria.
The real truth is – President Assad and his wife Asmas Al Assad, care about their people. Syria has been invaded with Islamic radicals that have terrorized their nation. We should be helping Assad, not the radical rebels who have infiltrated in the same manner the US manufactured ISIS has infiltrated throughout the entire region. President Assad is fighting terrorists.
Meanwhile before Obama’s push to topple Assad and take over Syria, the media wrote wonderful stories about President Assad and his wife Asmas. Vogue magazine issued a wonderful story calling Asmas the “Rose of The Desert”. After Obama’s regime targeted Syria, the media buried any good stories and began a cut throat propaganda campaign to match their new narrative of Assad as an evil dictator. (You know the drill). They have taken great lengths to rewrite wonderful stories where they once called Asmas Al Assad wonderful things and were amazed at the good will being done by Asmas to people of all faiths. Now they want you to believe that she was faking her lifetime of caring and sided with her so-called evil husband dictator.
The establishment media, in support of Obama’s regime have pushed a propaganda arsenal of civil war crisis and chaos, meanwhile they hired moderate Muslims, trained them and sent them in to fight a sovereign nation. Read more…
Optimizing logistics, detecting fraud, composing art, conducting research, providing translations: intelligent machine systems are transforming our lives for the better. As these systems become more capable, our world becomes more efficient and consequently richer.
Tech giants such as Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft – as well as individuals like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk – believe that now is the right time to talk about the nearly boundless landscape of artificial intelligence. In many ways, this is just as much a new frontier for ethics and risk assessment as it is for emerging technology. So which issues and conversations keep AI experts up at night?
1. Unemployment. What happens after the end of jobs?
The hierarchy of labour is concerned primarily with automation. As we’ve invented ways to automate jobs, we could create room for people to assume more complex roles, moving from the physical work that dominated the pre-industrial globe to the cognitive labour that characterizes strategic and administrative work in our globalized society.
Look at trucking: it currently employs millions of individuals in the United States alone. What will happen to them if the self-driving trucks promised by Tesla’s Elon Musk become widely available in the next decade? But on the other hand, if we consider the lower risk of accidents, self-driving trucks seem like an ethical choice. The same scenario could happen to office workers, as well as to the majority of the workforce in developed countries.
This is where we come to the question of how we are going to spend our time. Most people still rely on selling their time to have enough income to sustain themselves and their families. We can only hope that this opportunity will enable people to find meaning in non-labour activities, such as caring for their families, engaging with their communities and learning new ways to contribute to human society.
If we succeed with the transition, one day we might look back and think that it was barbaric that human beings were required to sell the majority of their waking time just to be able to live.
2. Inequality. How do we distribute the wealth created by machines?
Our economic system is based on compensation for contribution to the economy, often assessed using an hourly wage. The majority of companies are still dependent on hourly work when it comes to products and services. But by using artificial intelligence, a company can drastically cut down on relying on the human workforce, and this means that revenues will go to fewer people. Consequently, individuals who have ownership in AI-driven companies will make all the money.
We are already seeing a widening wealth gap, where start-up founders take home a large portion of the economic surplus they create. In 2014, roughly the same revenues were generated by the three biggest companies in Detroit and the three biggest companies in Silicon Valley … only in Silicon Valley there were 10 times fewer employees.
If we’re truly imagining a post-work society, how do we structure a fair post-labour economy?
3. Humanity. How do machines affect our behaviour and interaction?
Artificially intelligent bots are becoming better and better at modelling human conversation and relationships. In 2015, a bot named Eugene Goostman won the Turing Challenge for the first time. In this challenge, human raters used text input to chat with an unknown entity, then guessed whether they had been chatting with a human or a machine. Eugene Goostman fooled more than half of the human raters into thinking they had been talking to a human being.
This milestone is only the start of an age where we will frequently interact with machines as if they are humans; whether in customer service or sales. While humans are limited in the attention and kindness that they can expend on another person, artificial bots can channel virtually unlimited resources into building relationships.
Even though not many of us are aware of this, we are already witnesses to how machines can trigger the reward centres in the human brain. Just look at click-bait headlines and video games. These headlines are often optimized with A/B testing, a rudimentary form of algorithmic optimization for content to capture our attention. This and other methods are used to make numerous video and mobile games become addictive. Tech addiction is the new frontier of human dependency.
On the other hand, maybe we can think of a different use for software, which has already become effective at directing human attention and triggering certain actions. When used right, this could evolve into an opportunity to nudge society towards more beneficial behavior. However, in the wrong hands it could prove detrimental.
4. Artificial stupidity. How can we guard against mistakes?
Intelligence comes from learning, whether you’re human or machine. Systems usually have a training phase in which they “learn” to detect the right patterns and act according to their input. Once a system is fully trained, it can then go into test phase, where it is hit with more examples and we see how it performs.
Obviously, the training phase cannot cover all possible examples that a system may deal with in the real world. These systems can be fooled in ways that humans wouldn’t be. For example, random dot patterns can lead a machine to “see” things that aren’t there. If we rely on AI to bring us into a new world of labour, security and efficiency, we need to ensure that the machine performs as planned, and that people can’t overpower it to use it for their own ends.
5. Racist robots. How do we eliminate AI bias?
Though artificial intelligence is capable of a speed and capacity of processing that’s far beyond that of humans, it cannot always be trusted to be fair and neutral. Google and its parent company Alphabet are one of the leaders when it comes to artificial intelligence, as seen in Google’s Photos service, where AI is used to identify people, objects and scenes. But it can go wrong, such as when a camera missed the mark on racial sensitivity, or when asoftware used to predict future criminals showed bias against black people.
We shouldn’t forget that AI systems are created by humans, who can be biased and judgemental. Once again, if used right, or if used by those who strive for social progress, artificial intelligence can become a catalyst for positive change.
6. Security. How do we keep AI safe from adversaries?
The more powerful a technology becomes, the more can it be used for nefarious reasons as well as good. This applies not only to robots produced to replace human soldiers, or autonomous weapons, but to AI systems that can cause damage if used maliciously. Because these fights won’t be fought on the battleground only, cybersecurity will become even more important. After all, we’re dealing with a system that is faster and more capable than us by orders of magnitude.
7. Evil genies. How do we protect against unintended consequences?
It’s not just adversaries we have to worry about. What if artificial intelligence itself turned against us? This doesn’t mean by turning “evil” in the way a human might, or the way AI disasters are depicted in Hollywood movies. Rather, we can imagine an advanced AI system as a “genie in a bottle” that can fulfill wishes, but with terrible unforeseen consequences.
In the case of a machine, there is unlikely to be malice at play, only a lack of understanding of the full context in which the wish was made. Imagine an AI system that is asked to eradicate cancer in the world. After a lot of computing, it spits out a formula that does, in fact, bring about the end of cancer – by killing everyone on the planet. The computer would have achieved its goal of “no more cancer” very efficiently, but not in the way humans intended it.
8. Singularity. How do we stay in control of a complex intelligent system?
The reason humans are on top of the food chain is not down to sharp teeth or strong muscles. Human dominance is almost entirely due to our ingenuity and intelligence. We can get the better of bigger, faster, stronger animals because we can create and use tools to control them: both physical tools such as cages and weapons, and cognitive tools like training and conditioning.
This poses a serious question about artificial intelligence: will it, one day, have the same advantage over us? We can’t rely on just “pulling the plug” either, because a sufficiently advanced machine may anticipate this move and defend itself. This is what some call the “singularity”: the point in time when human beings are no longer the most intelligent beings on earth.
9. Robot rights. How do we define the humane treatment of AI?
While neuroscientists are still working on unlocking the secrets of conscious experience, we understand more about the basic mechanisms of reward and aversion. We share these mechanisms with even simple animals. In a way, we are building similar mechanisms of reward and aversion in systems of artificial intelligence. For example, reinforcement learning is similar to training a dog: improved performance is reinforced with a virtual reward.
Right now, these systems are fairly superficial, but they are becoming more complex and life-like. Could we consider a system to be suffering when its reward functions give it negative input? What’s more, so-called genetic algorithms work by creating many instances of a system at once, of which only the most successful “survive” and combine to form the next generation of instances. This happens over many generations and is a way of improving a system. The unsuccessful instances are deleted. At what point might we consider genetic algorithms a form of mass murder?
Once we consider machines as entities that can perceive, feel and act, it’s not a huge leap to ponder their legal status. Should they be treated like animals of comparable intelligence? Will we consider the suffering of “feeling” machines?
Some ethical questions are about mitigating suffering, some about risking negative outcomes. While we consider these risks, we should also keep in mind that, on the whole, this technological progress means better lives for everyone. Artificial intelligence has vast potential, and its responsible implementation is up to us.
What a mess! In the crazy Syrian war, US-backed and armed groups are fighting other US-backed rebel groups. How can this be?
It is so because the Obama White House had stirred up war in Syria but then lost control of the process. When the US has a strong president, he can usually keep the military and intelligence agencies on a tight leash.
But the Obama administration has had a weak secretary of defense and a bunch of lady strategists who are the worst military commanders since Louis XV, who put his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, in charge of French military forces during the Seven Year’s War. The French were routed by the Prussians. France’s foe, Frederick the Great of Prussia, named one of his dogs, ‘la Pompadour.’
As a result, the two arms of offensive US strategic power, the Pentagon and CIA, went separate ways in Syria. Growing competition between the US military and militarized CIA broke into the open in Syria.
Fed up with the astounding incompetence of the White House, the US military launched and supported its own rebel groups in Syria, while CIA did the same.
Fighting soon after erupted in Syria and Iraq between the US-backed groups. US Special Forces joined the fighting in Syria, Iraq and most lately, Libya.
The well-publicized atrocities, like mass murders and decapitations, greatly embarrassed Washington, making it harder to portray their jihadi wildmen as liberators. The only thing exceptional about US policy in Syria was its astounding incompetence.
Few can keep track of the 1,000 groups of jihadis that keep changing their names and shifting alliances. Throw in Turkomans, Yzidis, Armenians, Nestorians, Druze, Circassians, Alawis, Assyrians and Palestinians. Oh yes, and the Alevis.
Meanwhile, ISIS was inflicting mayhem on Syria and Iraq. But who really is ISIS? A few thousand twenty-something hooligans with little knowledge of Islam but a burning desire to dynamite the existing order and a sharp media sense. The leadership of these turbaned anarchists appears to have formed in US prison camps in Afghanistan.
The US, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey armed and financed ISIS as a weapon to unleash on Syria, which was an ally of Iran that refused to take orders from the Western powers. The west bears heavy responsibility for the deaths of 450,000 Syrians, at least half the nation of 23 million becoming refugees, and destruction of this once lovely country.
At some point, ISIS shook off its western tutors and literally ran amok. But the US has not yet made a concerted attempt to crush ISIS because of its continuing usefulness in Syria and in the US, where ISIS has become the favorite whipping boy of politicians.
Next come the Kurds, an ancient Indo-European stateless people spread across Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. They have been denied a national state by the western powers since WWI. Kurdish rebels in Iraq have been armed and financed by Israel since the 1970’s.
When America’s Arab jihadists proved militarily feeble, the US turned to the Kurds, who are renowned fighters, arming and financing the Kurdish Syrian YPG which is part of the well-known PKK rebel group that fights Turkey.
I covered the Turkish-Kurdish conflict in eastern Anatolia in the 1980’s in which some 40,000 died.
Turkey is now again battling a rising wave of Kurdish attacks that caused the Turks to probe into northern Syria to prevent a link-up of advancing Kurdish rebel forces.
So, Turkey, a key American ally, is now battling CIA-backed Kurdish groups in Syria. Eighty percent of Turks believe the recent failed coup in Turkey was mounted by the US – not the White House, but by the Pentagon which has always been joined at the hip to Turkey’s military.
This major Turkish-Kurdish crisis was perfectly predictable, but the obtuse junior warriors of the Obama administration failed to grasp this point.
Now the Russians have entered the fray in an effort to prevent their ally, Bashar Assad, from being overthrow by western powers. Also perfectly predictable. Russia claimed to be bombing ISIS but in fact is targeting US-backed groups. Washington is outraged that the wicked Russians are doing in the Mideast what the US has done for decades.
The US and Russia now both claim to have killed a senior ISIS commander in an air strike. Their warplanes are dodging one another, creating a perfect scenario for a head-on clash at a time when neocons in the US are agitating for war with Russia.
Does anyone think poor, demolished Syria is worth the price? Hatred for the US is now seething in Turkey and across the Mideast. Hundreds of millions of US tax dollars have been wasted in this cruel, pointless war.
Time for the US to stop stirring this witch’s brew.
Chinese president Xi Jinping has vowed for the first time that China should take the lead in shaping the “new world order” and safeguarding international security, one of the latest moves putting him in stark contrast to Donald Trump and the US president’s “America First” policy.
Editor’s Note: Thought it would be interesting to go back almost four years and post this election 2016 article about how the media was already distorting the news after Trump became the duly elected President of the United States. The mainstream media, left/liberal or otherwise, always has a political agenda (not a journalistic one) to serve their corporate/elite masters. These media distortions, and their pursuit of “fake news”, aligns only with their preordained narrative. This has left the mainstream media with no credibility whatsoever.
What do evil dictators look like? What do they talk like? Just how wicked is an evil dictator’s wife ? Should she be toppled along with her husband? Who am I talking about? President Assad of Syria and his wife, Asmas Al Assad.
By Julie Bossmann
Liberty International News 