McCarthyism
2.0 – part 1
The
U.S. government is creating a new $160 million bureaucracy to shut
down information that doesn’t conform to U.S. propaganda
narratives, building on the strategy that sold the bloody Syrian
“regime change” war.
by
Rick Sterling
The U.S. establishment is not
content simply to have domination over the media narratives on
critical foreign policy issues, such as Syria, Ukraine and Russia. It
wants total domination. Thus we now have the “Countering Foreign
Propaganda and Disinformation Act” that President Obama signed into
law on Dec. 23 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for
2017, setting aside $160 million to combat any “propaganda” that
challenges Official Washington’s version of reality.
The new law mandates the U.S.
Secretary of State to collaborate with the Secretary of Defense,
Director of National Intelligence and other federal agencies to
create a Global Engagement Center “to lead, synchronize, and
coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize,
understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state
propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United
States national security interests.” The law directs the Center
to be formed in 180 days and to share expertise among agencies and to
“coordinate with allied nations.”
The legislation was initiated in
March 2016, as the demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin
and Russia was already underway and was enacted amid the allegations
of “Russian hacking” around the U.S. presidential election and
the mainstream media’s furor over supposedly “fake news.”
Defeated Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton voiced
strong support for the bill: “It’s imperative that leaders in
both the private sector and the public sector step up to protect our
democracy, and innocent lives.”
The new law is remarkable for a
number of reasons, not the least because it merges a new McCarthyism
about purported dissemination of Russian “propaganda” on the
Internet with a new Orwellianism by creating a kind of Ministry of
Truth – or Global Engagement Center – to protect the American
people from “foreign propaganda and disinformation.”
As part of the effort to detect
and defeat these unwanted narratives, the law authorizes the Center
to: “Facilitate the use of a wide range of technologies and
techniques by sharing expertise among Federal departments and
agencies, seeking expertise from external sources, and implementing
best practices.” (This section is an apparent reference to
proposals that Google, Facebook and other technology companies find
ways to block or brand certain Internet sites as purveyors of
“Russian propaganda” or “fake news.”)
Justifying this new bureaucracy,
the bill’s sponsors argued that the existing agencies for
“strategic communications” and “public diplomacy”
were not enough, that the information threat required “a
whole-of-government approach leveraging all elements of national
power.”
The law also is rife with irony
since the U.S. government and related agencies are among the world’s
biggest purveyors of propaganda and disinformation – or what you
might call evidence-free claims, such as the recent accusations of
Russia hacking into Democratic emails to “influence” the U.S.
Election.
Despite these accusations —
leaked by the Obama administration and embraced as true by the
mainstream U.S. news media — there is little or no public evidence
to support the charges. There is also a contradictory analysis by
veteran U.S. intelligence professionals as well as statements by
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and an associate, former British
Ambassador Craig Murray, that the Russians were not the source of the
leaks. Yet, the mainstream U.S. media has virtually ignored this
counter-evidence, appearing eager to collaborate with the new “Global
Engagement Center” even before it is officially formed.
Of course, there is a long history
of U.S. disinformation and propaganda. Former CIA agents Philip Agee
and John Stockwell documented how it was done decades ago, secretly
planting “black propaganda” and covertly funding media outlets to
influence events around the world, with much of the fake news blowing
back into the American media.
In more recent decades, the U.S.
government has adopted an Internet-era version of that formula with
an emphasis on having the State Department or the U.S.-funded
National Endowment for Democracy supply, train and pay “activists”
and “citizen journalists” to create and distribute propaganda and
false stories via “social media” and via contacts with the
mainstream media. The U.S. government’s strategy also seeks to
undermine and discredit journalists who challenge this orthodoxy. The
new legislation escalates this information war by tossing another
$160 million into the pot.
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