If you think I was mean to Natasha Bertrand yesterday (I said she lied) you should see Glenn Greenwald's take.
The two things a democracy requires from journalism is truth (or less portentously, accuracy) and holding power to account. If the journos don't do that they are worse than useless.
In yesterday's "RAND: "Truth Decay Is Putting U.S. National Security at Risk"" I mentioned Natasha Bertrand and her lies and intended to include this earlier post as the outro.
Unfortunately the RAND post was getting lengthy so here it is as a stand-alone. Originally posted August 18, 2021:
And thereby led to the deaths of tens of thousands, the expenditure of trillions, and the diversion of focus and resources from Afghanistan, thus allowing that conflict to fester for 20 'effin years.
Thanks to a friend for the recollection and to Glenn Greenwald for the explication.
Most folks who have studied the antecedents to the invasion of Iraq are aware of the role of the New York Time in spreading the CIA's lies* about weapons of mass destruction, front and center was reporter Judith Miller but there were many others at the Times who were beating the war drums, for some reason Tom Friedman sticks out in my memory. David Brooks on the op-ed pages is another.
The Times' role as a cog in the killing machine was so blatant that in June 2014 the paper's public editor, Margaret Sullivan, wrote a column: "Covering New War, in Shadow of Old One" where she said the Times' coverage was "flawed, driven by outside agendas and lacking in needed skepticism." She went on: "Nevertheless, given The Times’ troubled history when it comes to this subject, readers have good reason to be wary about what appears in the paper about military intervention in Iraq. And based on what I am already hearing from them, they are....:
That's the American Paper of Record.
Here's Greenwald at his substack, April 27. His focus is another of the journos who disseminate the CIA's deceits* but he starts out with an interesting take on now Atlantic EiC, Jeffrey Goldberg:
CNN's New "Reporter," Natasha Bertrand, is a Deranged Conspiracy Theorist and Scandal-Plagued CIA Propagandist
The most important axiom for understanding how the U.S. corporate media functions is that there is never accountability for those who serve as propagandists for the U.S. security state. The opposite is true: the more aggressively and recklessly you spread CIA narratives or pro-war manipulation, the more rewarded you will be in that world.
The classic case is Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote one of the most deceitful and destructive articles of his generation: a lengthy New Yorker article in May, 2002 — right as the propagandistic groundwork for the invasion of Iraq was being laid — that claimed Saddam Hussein had formed an alliance with Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. In February, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, NPR host Robert Siegel devoted a long segment to this claim. When he asked Goldberg about “a man named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” Goldberg replied: “He is one of several men who might personify a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.”
Needless to say, nothing could generate hatred for someone among the American population — just nine months away from the 9/11 attack — more than associating them with bin Laden. Five months after Goldberg's New Yorker article, the U.S. Congress authorized the use of military force to impose regime change on Iraq; ten months later, the U.S. invaded Iraq; and by September, 2003, close to 70% of Americans believed the lie that Saddam had personally participated in the 9/11 attack.
Goldberg's fabrication-driven article generated ample celebratory media attention and even prestigious journalism awards. It also led to great financial reward and career advancement. In 2007, The Atlantic's publisher David Bradley lured Goldberg away from The New Yorker by lavishing him with a huge signing bonus and even sent exotic horses to entertain Goldberg's children. Goldberg is now the editor-in-chief of that magazine and thus one of the most influential figures in media. In other words, the person who wrote what is arguably the most disastrous article of that decade was one most rewarded by the industry — all because he served the aims of the U.S. security state and its war aims. That is how U.S. corporate journalism functions.
Another illustrative mascot for this lucrative career path is NBC's national security correspondent Ken Dilanian. In 2014, his own former paper, The Los Angeles Times, acknowledged his "collaborative” relationship with the CIA. During his stint there, he mimicked false claims from John Brennan's CIA that no innocent people were killed from a 2012 Obama drone strike, only for human rights groups and leaked documents to prove many were.
A FOIA request produced documents published by The Intercept in 2015 that showed Dilanian submitting his "reporting” to the CIA for approval....
....MUCH MORE
Mr. Goldberg has on his Atlantic staff a guy named David Frum, a neocon former Bush speechwriter who never met a war he didn't like, as long as it was someone else's sons and daughters getting killed and maimed. We'll have more on him and Goldberg as the debacle in Afghanistan unfolds.*from our post marking the death of John le Carré last year:Whenever I hear a spook talk, Brennan, Clapper, Dearlove, Steele, any of them, I am reminded of the John le Carré line:
“What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs?”
— Alec Leamas, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, 1963
They lie for a living. They're professional liars, the very nature of their business is lies and trafficking in lies.
[note: le Carré worked for both MI5 and MI6, he knew these people]
And following the jump to Mr. Greenwald's substack:
....A FOIA request produced documents published by The Intercept in 2015 that showed Dilanian submitting his "reporting” to the CIA for approval in violation of The LA Times’ own ethical guidelines and then repeating what he was told to say. But again, serving the CIA even with false "reporting” and unethical behavior is a career benefit in corporate media, not an impediment, and Dilanian rapidly fell upward after these embarrassing revelations. He first went to Associated Press and then to NBC News, where he broadcast numerous false Russiagate scams including purporting to “independently confirm” CNN's ultimately retracted bombshell that Donald Trump, Jr. obtained advance access to the 2016 WikiLeaks archive.
The Huffington Post, Sept. 5, 2014
On Monday, CNN made clear that this dynamic still drives the corporate media world. The network proudly announced that it had hired Natasha Bertrand away from Politico. In doing so, they added to their stable of former CIA operatives, NSA spies, Pentagon Generals and FBI agents a reporter who has done as much as anyone, if not more so, to advance the scripts of those agencies.
Bertrand's career began taking off when, while at Business Insider, she abandoned her obsession with Russia's role in Syria in 2016 in order to monomaniacally fixate on every last conspiracy theory and gossip item that drove the Russiagate fraud during the 2016 campaign and then into the Trump presidency. Each month, Bertrand produced dozens of Russiagate articles for the site that were so unhinged that they made Rachel Maddow look sober, cautious and reliable.....
....MUCH MORE
As has been shown over the last few years, Russiagate was "The Big Lie", as practiced by Hitler and then Goebbels.
(The Columbia Journalism Review Destroys The New York Times Over Their Russiagate/Trump Coverage)
And the problem with basing your politics on the big lie is that there is a straight line from the lie in 1925 to the establishment of Dachau for political prisoners in 1933 to Aktion T4 beginning in 1939 to the Holocaust by Bullets beginning in early summer 1941 to the mass-murder factories in early 1942.
In the U.S. the thing to watch for is an increasing tempo of eliminationist rhetoric.
....Next up a pretty good definition of eliminationism via Marquette University Law Review:
Eliminationist Discourse in a Conflicted Society: Lessons for America from Africa?
1. The phrase ―eliminationist has been used by David Neiwert, a journalist who has long covered right-wing discourse and action in the United States. Joshua Holland, The Terrorist Threat: Right-Wing Radicals and the Eliminationist Mindset, AlterNet (June 12, 2009), http://www.alternet.org/story/140578/. Niewert credits the phrase to DANIEL GOLDHAGEN, HITLER‘S WILLING EXECUTIONERS: ORDINARY GERMANS AND THE HOLOCAUST (1996). Holland, supra. The book explains the rhetorical mechanisms and socio-economic dynamics that led Germany‘s non-radical majority to acquiesce, then accept the race politics of the Nazi regime. See generally GOLDHAGEN, supra. ―Eliminationism claims a moral purpose, holding that political opponents are ―a cancer on the body politic that must be excised—either by separation from the public at large, through censorship, or by outright extermination—in order to protect the purity of the nation.
That's a footnote!
To repeat:
"―Eliminationism claims a moral purpose, holding that political opponents are ―a cancer on the body politic that must be excised—either by separation from the public at large, through censorship, or by outright extermination—in order to protect the purity of the nation."
The phrase is used in Holocaust and other genocide studies, as here re: the study of the Einsatzgruppen, the Ordnungspolizei "German Order Police" and their henchmen, the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and the Trawniki Men in the Generalgouvernement in occupied Poland; and in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian SSR.
This was the Holocaust by bullets, the murder of some 1.5 to 2 million people outside the Nazi murder factories system (Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor and Treblinka.)
The Holocaust by bullets included the two day killathon of 33,771 souls at Babi Yar outside of Kyiv and the less-well-known Aktion Erntefest (Harvest Festival) outside Lublin Poland when 43,000 were shot to death. Along with the Odessa Ukrainian SSR massacre in 1941 by Germans, Romanian allies and Ukrainian collaborators where over 30,000 people were murdered, those were three of the ten thousand locations across Eastern Europe where populations were simply annihilated in place.
It would also apply to the Hamburg scum in Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland and Father Desbois, whose book Holocaust by Bullets notes some of the 1744 slaughter sites his work has uncovered,
I bring up all this history because the use of eliminationist talk is a direct precursor to genocide. Which makes the series of Medium posts by Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira back in 2017-2018 so interesting.
The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War
Why there’s no bipartisan way forward at this juncture in our history — one side must win....
....MUCH MORE
This morning Forbes was reporting: "Hillary Clinton Suggests ‘Formal Deprogramming’ For ‘MAGA Extremists’ Who Still Support Trump"
I wonder if they will have purpose-built camps.
