Monday, December 12, 2016

CIA-WaPo Suspicious “election hack” Claim

“The CIA says” is never a great way to start a sentence. But that’s the basis of the latest charge that Russia hacked the US presidential election.

Members of Congress have now been secretly briefed by the CIA on “the Russian affair,” and media, led by the Washington Post, are running with the story that Russia influenced the US election on the side of Trump. Until and unless the denizens of Langley decide to show specific and convincing evidence for their claim, this is disinformation.

It’s easy to assemble a circumstantial case. But each case has to be judged on its own merits, and the devil is in the details. If we aren’t privy to those details in the “Russian affair,” no judgement is possible. Of course, major media outlets don’t seem bothered by that. They’re happy to cite the CIA as an authority—conveniently ignoring the fact that people in the intelligence field are taught to lie. It’s their stock in trade.

You might remember the Washington Post’s role in defaming and destroying a reporter named Gary Webb, who published a series of articles in the Mercury News about the CIA seeding black Los Angeles neighborhoods with crack cocaine. The Post basically asked the CIA whether the charge was true, and when the Agency denied it, the Post attacked Webb as a “fake news” reporter. The same Washington Post is now leading the campaign to tie the Russian government to Hillary Clinton’s defeat. And the Post, once again, is using unproven statements from the CIA to back up their claim.

You could go on and on about the Post and its historic CIA ties. But now, right now, the owner of the Post is Jeff Bezos, who also owns Amazon. And Amazon has a $600 million contract to provide the CIA cloud computing services.

Boom.

Ordinarily, that would be called a fatal conflict of interest, whenever the Post opens up its yap about the CIA in any context. However, mainstream news outlets, the very big ones, don’t go around criticizing each other’s ownerships; so the Bezos-CIA relationship is conveniently ignored and left “in the past.”

And who exactly are the fake news outlet?