Op-Ed: Biden’s New Old World of Disinformation, Censorship, & Dissent
By Simon Turner
"America is back in the game," said Joe Biden when President-elect. Former President Trump was himself briefly acclaimed for rejoining the game when bombing Syria in 2017 and 2018. The action, following claims of Syrian government chemical weapons attacks, was seen as a return to normalcy.
On Inauguration Day, Syrian Permanent Representative to the UN, Bashar al-Jaafari, called for the new administration to "stop acts of aggression and occupation, plundering the wealth of my country [and] withdraw its occupying forces." But although an occupying force is always the aggressor, last month's rocket attacks in Iraq "outraged" the White House and were answered by Biden bombing Syria in "self-defense."
Two days after President Biden's inauguration, a US military convoy entered North-East Syria from Iraq. It joined 500 troops deployed to a US oil company "modernizing" oil fields. Business as usual between two occupations. US-led NATO will increase troop levels in Iraq to up to 5,000 without asking Iraq's parliament – which in January 2020 voted to expel all US troops – to "help Iraq assert its sovereignty" (Richard Mills, US Deputy Ambassador to the UN).
As a disinformation campaign, however, according to recent revelations, the Syrian conflict outdid the war on Iraq and even its WMDs.
Neither Iraq, Libya, nor Syria posed a threat to the US. Therefore, the public's psychological preparation by the media to accept the idea of war was necessary each time. For the first Gulf War, a girl, Nayirah, said she witnessed Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators. She had been coached by the Hill & Knowlton PR firm and was revealed too late as the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter, a member of the Kuwaiti royal family. For Libya, Susan Rice made accusations at the UN of Viagra-fueled mass rape.
Today on the home front following the Capitol invasion, there has been far less need for the manufacture of consent. Nevertheless, Chuck Schumer evoked Pearl Harbor. Nancy Pelosi agreed with Hillary Clinton on Clinton's podcast about the necessity of a "9/11-type commission." But a state of permanent war and a sustained attack on civil liberties followed 9/11, Barbara Lee's lone voice of restraint unheeded.
Back in November, former president, Obama, called the internet, "The single biggest threat to our democracy." Now, the Biden administration and its private monopoly social media representation has the opportunity to censor debate. As ever, the speech proposed to justify censorship is of those we most hate. But they, more than anyone, are the test of our freedoms and ensure the protection of all minority voices.
Obama prosecuted twice as many whistleblowers under the Espionage Act as all other presidents combined and normalized using it to charge journalists' sources. But he couldn't prosecute WikiLeaks' Julian Assange without undermining all journalists' First Amendment freedoms. (Assange, the journalist, has won prizes for the documents he communicated to the public and is charged for doing things journalists do.) Trump went ahead anyway.
Assange has said, "If wars can be started with lies, wars can be stopped with the truth." At his UK trial, Assange was confined within a glass box for his dangerous truth.
In the fall, WikiLeaks released the original OPCW report of the April 7, 2018, chemical weapons attack in Duma, Syria. This report by the weapons inspectorate team on the ground at Duma concluded no attack had occurred. However, the released report flipped these findings, stating that evidence of a chemical weapons attack had been found. The US, Britain, and France used the altered report to justify their bombing of Syria, one of the bombings that had gained Trump his bipartisan support.
These same countries then blocked José Bustani, the OPCW's purged former director-general, from speaking on the issue at the UN. But Aaron Maté of The Grayzone, a rare dissenting news outlet, presented the case. Following the WikiLeaks release, heads of the Duma group, sidelined following their report and a subsequent US delegation visit, have also come forward as whistleblowers. They face pushback from the likes of the Western State- and NED-funded Bellingcat.
In this way, WikiLeaks holds the powerful to account, exposing systematic abuse worldwide that would otherwise be classified for decades, released only as history. As the most important journalist and publisher of our time for the staggering scale of the abuses exposed, Assange is the first to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. US Espionage trials, in contrast, are conducted in secret and use secret evidence that the defense and public can't access. They acquit no one.
Assange's trial has generated minimal coverage, although as said, his precedent would directly impact the corporate media's own freedoms. But a press whose role is to "allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages out to the public" (Chomsky) and to sell a "security" narrative in foreign policy would feel unthreatened. Or is Assange undeserving: the justice-fleeing rapist, indiscriminately releasing names and causing harm?
For the Afghan and Iraq War Diaries' publication, Assange collaborated with The Guardian's David Leigh. Leigh subsequently wrote a book in which he revealed the shared files' encryption key. Consequently, Assange unredacted all names on WikiLeaks so no security agency could break the compromised code before the documents' named individuals. He then phoned the White House to warn of the risk to lives posed.
In whistleblower Chelsea Manning's trial, a US official admitted no-one had been harmed due to the War Diaries.
On Assange in Sweden, Nils Melzer, UN rapporteur on torture: "Why would a person be subject to nine years of a preliminary investigation for rape without charges ever having been filed? The willful malevolence of the authorities became apparent when they immediately – August 20, 2010 – disseminated the suspicion of rape via the tabloid press. The timing is decisive: In late July, the Afghan War Diary. The US immediately demanded that its allies inundate Assange with criminal cases."
"The testimony was changed by the Stockholm police to somehow make it sound like a possible rape," said Melzer. "I have all the documents in my possession, the emails, the text messages." Assange stayed an extra month and asked the prosecutor for authorization to leave on September 27. She agreed, then scheduled the interview for the 28th.
Anonymous stepped into WikiLeaks' shoes with the evidence for a huge further Grayzone Syria exposé. UK government Foreign Office documents revealed a massive UK-funded propaganda operation to turn the public in the US and elsewhere against Assad. Fighting Assad was to be seen as morally correct via offshoot Al Qaeda jihadists being viewed as Syrian heirs to the Arab Spring.
Jake Sullivan, now Biden's National Security Advisor, said in a 2012 email to Hillary Clinton released by Wikileaks, "Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria."
British contractors like ARK and TGSN - headed by Richard Barrett, former MI6 director of global counter-terrorism - formed media production companies. They trained hundreds from the ground up to create programming from Syria. "The contractors then liaised between opposition media activists they had themselves trained and Reuters, New York Times, CNN, BBC, Financial Times, The Times, The Guardian, and Aljazeera," reported Ben Norton of The Grayzone.
The Grayzone investigates war & empire: the US military right to "ensure uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources" (the Clinton doctrine), and the impact domestically. But last year, The Grayzone joined a "small number of sources" on Wikipedia with a stop-sign icon for sites that "fail the reliable sources guideline in nearly all circumstances." The site received Wikipedia's color-coded dark red "deprecated source" designation.
At Wikipedia, next month Katherine Maher will finish up her 7-year tenure as Chief Communications Officer. She is a member of the Open Technology Fund (OTF) advisory board. The OTF is a technology arm of Radio Free Asia, which the New York Times called a "worldwide propaganda network built by the CIA."
Maher has also worked for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Orwellian-named National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Both organizations finance regime-change worldwide.
USAID said it contributed $32 million to the White Helmets. This Syrian volunteer organization didn't "run to the bombs" but was necessarily embedded in the jihadist opposition. News outlets gratefully accepted a steady stream of footage, not only taken on face value but acclaimed. ARK oversaw the White Helmets' training at the intelligence operations base, Gaziantep, in southern Turkey, a city Katherine Maher tweeted on October 13, 2012, that she planned to go to in a few days.
Swedish Professors and Doctors for Human Rights (SWEDHR) called out the White Helmets' March 2015 chemical weapons attack video as faked. SWEDHR addresses war crimes, torture, and "government assaults on the human rights of individuals who have denounced war crimes or exposed serious infringements to civil liberties." The video is of a supposed life-saving injection by the White Helmets. No substance leaves the syringe. SWEDHR denounced "war-criminal behavior and misuse of dead children with propaganda aims."
Similarly dissenting, and one of the few journalists to do so, was Seymour Hersh, among the most influential journalists of modern times. Hersh was refused a US outlet for his 2017 Khan Shaykhun chemical attack report.
Representative Tulsi Gabbard was another outlier. She created a furor in January 2017 by speaking of the Syrian opposition as jihadists, and visiting Syria. Gabbard even had impromptu meetings with President Assad. But on Capitol Hill, the press conference for her Stop Arming Terrorists Act drew a total of 4 reporters. The corporate media reflected the world "as powerful groups wish it to be perceived" (Chomsky) rather than committed to discovering the truth.
New Secretary of State Tony Blinken was the author of Obama's chemical weapons" red line" strategy to trigger US intervention in Syria. Then his CNAS think tank also recommended "wheat to apply pressure," leading to near-famine. Back in 2003, Blinken was also Biden's closest foreign policy advisor when he secured the Democratic support needed for the war on Iraq. Tony Blinken still seeks regime change in Venezuela, which he says is "led by a brutal dictator" irrespective of election observer reports.
But Blinken is "ideal," with his "commitment to international cooperation, refugee issues, and humanitarian work." On Syria, Blinken has spoken of the need to "acknowledge that we failed, not for want of trying, but we failed" to prevent "horrific loss of life" and "massive displacement." But the proxy war for regime change disinformation campaign under Obama in fact succeeded. Aided by a CIA Syria budget of up to $1 billion per year, it created an alternative reality that rallied and sustained public support for rebranded jihadists.
Tony Blinken is a "super nice" "father of two toddlers who has his own band." Avril Haines joined him as the first woman director of national intelligence. Haines designed and oversaw Obama's drone campaign and covered up for torture. Samantha Vinograd quoted Haines called "quite literally the nicest person any of us have ever met." Yamiche Alcindor on MSNBC reported, "Here are the superheroes to come and save us all," "good stewards of America's role in this world."
The administration is also the most diverse ever. Glenn Greenwald:
““You drape the Raytheon (weapons) building in the rainbow flag, and you have the CIA celebrate Women’s Day, and you have Boeing donate money to Black Lives Matter. They exploit ‘woke’ ideology and culture war issues to make the Democratic Party base think they have allies marching behind them. They put black faces, female faces, Latino faces and gay faces on corporatist and militarist policies, to soften them.””
The ARK PR firm's role in Syria was similarly to soften the image of the groups it marketed, to distinguish them.
In a moment of candor, Obama described the US political parties themselves as "fighting inside the 40-yard line" apart from rhetoric and tactics. Both parties' biggest donors are drawn from the arms industry, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Big Pharma. The new Defense Secretary, recently retired general Lloyd Austin, comes straight from Raytheon. He has up to $1.7 million in shares in the business (of war).
Further closing the gap, Biden seeks Julian Assange's extradition: Trump's position, not Obama's. Moreover, Biden will not resurrect Obama's Iran deal after Trump but seeks more conditions, though the US, not Iran, left the deal. The administration wishes to first look at Iran's "destabilizing" activities and its support for terrorist proxies. Where is the better argument for the truth of the existence of the exceptionalism of the powerful?
In his inaugural address, President Biden warned of the threat of domestic terrorism, potentially bringing the "War on Terror" home. Democrat Adam Shiff's bill is available. Biden used to claim he practically wrote the Patriot Act, which massively increased government surveillance powers and suppressed free speech in the wake of 9/11. In the meantime, 5,000 troops will likely remain in Washington indefinitely, sustaining the appearance of the need for stricter controls on Trump supporters.
At 1/6, Nancy Pelosi lobbied for what the Joint Chiefs of Staff said would have amounted to a "military coup," calling them to cut the president out of the chain of command. At the end of 2020, though, Trump represented the choice of more Americans than any former president despite his handling of the pandemic. He received more votes than 2008 Obama.
The Democratic Party struggles to address economic injustice and the drift into Trump's arms, disregarding its former blue-collar base in answering to corporate donors. The progressive wing lacks the teeth to use the leverage it commands in Congress for popular measures like Medicare for All and a $15 minimum wage.
Alternatively, the party could control communication and isolate via suppression of speech. Under Schiff's bill, the government could unilaterally declare terrorist organizations, as in Syria, where simple expediency ruled whether terrorist groups were declared, supported, or opposed.
Facebook has employed an Atlantic Council body, the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), as its censor. The Atlantic Council board includes several former CIA directors, and it is funded by the arms industry, NATO, and Gulf dictatorships. The council urges "red lines" toward China in the South China Sea and in the Russiagate-reminiscent case of cyberattacks. In Syria, red lines were an open invitation to partisan false flag operations escalating conflict. Russiagate, employing the familiar communist boogeyman, made do without them.
In her first public appearance after losing to Trump, it was Hillary Clinton who called out "malicious fake news." Now, even progressives like Ed Markey call for more censorship. AOC pushed for the removal of Parler from app stores and hosting services. Facebook has ejected the (British) Socialist Workers Party, while Twitter suspended 4 Antifa accounts sharing 71K followers. Google's YouTube demonetizes with "Harmful content: Content that focuses on controversial issues and that is harmful to viewers." Controversial/harmful? Trump supporters? No. Dissenting speech. Censorship isn't picky.
But on March 25, social media will answer again in Committee why it isn't censoring more "disinformation." However, the First Amendment forbids government coercion for censorship on its behalf, no matter how intertwined the actors may be… Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have multi-billion dollar commercial deals with the CIA, and Reddit's policy director is a big name from the Atlantic Council. Concerning disinformation, it "is a large part of [the CIA's] covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target of its lies (Ralph McGehee)."
In 1988, Herman and Chomsky identified the "subordination of the media to the requirements of the state propaganda system." They called the public thus "managed and mobilized from above." William Arkin reported the same when he left NBC and MSNBC in January 2019. He described the mass media as a "machine of perpetual war acceptance…the ball kept in play." Two weeks ago, Press Secretary Jen said, "The circumstances in Syria remain as dire, or more, today than they were just a couple of years ago." The US "Caesar" sanctions specifically target reconstruction, which no-one mentioned.
These are the machinations of the military-industrial complex. Meanwhile, Joe Biden is coming for its whistleblower, Julian Assange. Biden called Assange a "high-tech terrorist" in 2010, the year of 128 CIA drone attacks in Pakistan by the administration for which he was second in command, with at least 89 civilians killed. The January extradition hearing illustrated "the staggering disproportion between the scale of the crimes Assange has exposed" and that "no evidence whatsoever has been produced that as a result of any of Assange's actions anyone has come to any actual physical harm (Alexander Mercouris)."
Trump's decision to prosecute has the greatest potential chilling effect on freedom of speech. But Biden, as if Trump had been his boss, not Obama, has followed in Trump's footsteps, appealing the ruling against Assange's extradition. The UK judge, Vanessa Baraitser, who made the initial ruling, cited Assange's mental health issues and the conditions of his likely destination, US "supermax" prison, ADX Colorado. However, she threw out all press freedom and human rights arguments. A cross-appeal heard simultaneously with the US appeal could return the hearing to grave crimes and the right to know but risk undermining the first judgment.
The US is viewed as a "force for good," so a US ship patrolling the waters off China's coast is "defensive." How about if these were foreign ships patrolling the coast of the US?
"Terrorism" is never applicable to the great powers. Therefore, a War on Terror can be announced, and it can target the terrorists that don't work for us or our allies…In 2014, VP Biden told the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, the Saudis, "determined to take down Assad poured (in) hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons to Al-Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis." He then had to take it all back and thank the Saudi foreign minister for his country's role in fighting ISIS.
In October 2009, Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for the "hope for a better future" based on the power of his words after only nine months of his presidency. Shortly after that, the Espionage Act was used to charge Shamai Leibowitz in December, when Obama also hindered future legally binding climate treaties. But Obama had already changed course by May when asserting indefinite detention without trial. The first of his authorized continued extraordinary renditions was a further month earlier, in April, when, additionally, blanket immunity was given to torturers. From the summer onward, the Honduran coup regime supported. Drone kills doubled. The war in Afghanistan escalated.
During the War on Terror, the US closely allied with the Saudis, the world's leading sponsors of terrorism, but bombed seven other countries. Now, the government has concluded that Saudi Crown Prince bin Salman directly approved the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. But bin Salman will not be sanctioned. Jen Psaki cited "the rocket attacks that they are getting from bad actors right at their doorstep." Joe Biden has also referred to strikes against the country and vowed continued support for Saudi Arabia's "sovereignty." In contrast, in Yemen, over 100,000 people have died due to the actual threat to its sovereignty from the Saudi coalition.
Psaki noted that "historically, the United States, through Democratic and Republican presidents, has not typically sanctioned government leaders of countries where we have diplomatic relations." "Human rights" have always been what enemy states violate and are punished for.
The interventions in both Iraq and Libya were argued on humanitarian grounds. But up to 1 million people died in Iraq, and the administration wouldn't consider Gadaffi's offer of a transition of power. Libya was a recognized bulwark against fundamentalism, with the highest Human Development Index in Africa. It became a "failed state," like Iraq, a seedbed for fundamentalism, a society undone.
Last month, Biden reiterated, "We shine the light, the lamp, of liberty on oppressed people" and announced, "Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy."
Libya, Iran, Syria, China, Russia, and Venezuela go their own way, not fitting into the grand US scheme of things. Cuba has been under an economic embargo for 60 years for its impudence in repelling regime change. Nevertheless, about 40 countries have received Cuban doctors and healthcare professionals to help them fight the pandemic, following hundreds of thousands more for decades. Nelson Mandela said, "What other country has such a history of selfless behavior as Cuba has shown for the people of Africa?" The State Department says "forced labor," The Wall Street Journal, "slave trade in doctors," and The New York Times, "agents," coercing voters.
Sovereignty or self-determination – like Latin American social-democratic governments' "threat of a good example" to their people – is always the great threat because populations are unpredictable. The same is true at home.
Corporate media may deliver the Pentagon talking points of most need-to-know information, but these are not the only media outlets. Therefore, pressure to suppress speech is applied to Silicon Valley to pass it on to marginal voices that lack vested interests, circumscribing the limits of their debate.
Joe Biden’s inaugural address intro on domestic terrorism provided psychological preparation towards the public acceptance of further suppression. Will it be a broader definition of incitement to violence or perhaps denial of freedom of association?
It's not only about Trump supporters, though isolating them is a big plus, but also the left who are always a thorn in the side when all you want is your society to speak with one voice; and also the world. Way back in 1961, the Espionage Act was extended, removing its restriction to the US's maritime jurisdiction and the high seas. The ground was laid back then, but it took Trump and Biden to see the potential. Shooting the messenger, Assange, exposes Biden as lacking a commitment to the First Amendment while NSA spying methodology globally is already "Collect it all."
If we were not locked into the view of the US as a force for good, 800 military bases worldwide might seem oppressive.
Meet the Writer
Simon Turner is a part-time writer, cultural centre and squatted building film programmer, outsider environments witness and photographer, and self-taught world hitchhiker.
