RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/16/liz-cheney-was-a-primary-culprit-of-spreading-fake-news-on-russian-bounties-to-undermine-trump/

U.S. intelligence agencies debunked on Thursday what was treated as blockbuster election-year reporting last summer of an anonymously sourced story in The New York Times claiming the Kremlin placed bounties on American troops in Afghanistan.

President Donald Trump, went the tale, deliberately downplayed the aggression to appease Russia and accelerate the timeline to withdraw U.S. forces. Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, currently number three in House leadership, was a primary purveyor of the fake news.

“The United States intelligence community assesses with low to moderate confidence that Russian intelligence officers sought to encourage Taliban attacks on U.S. and coalition personnel in Afghanistan in 2019 and perhaps earlier,” a senior administration official said, according to the readout of a call with reporters in the Daily Beast.

Officials said their conclusion of “low to moderate confidence” in the story, which effectively means it’s at best unproven and potentially false, came “in part because it relies on detainee reporting,” an often unreliable source of intelligence on which to base such explosive claims.

As the story picked up traction in the corporate press, however, Cheney appeared to sense a prime opportunity to capitalize on what was treated as a scandal, to not only undermine Trump, but also justify a prolonged military presence in the region while the administration took steps to pull out. Neither to Cheney, nor legacy media, appeared to hesitate due to the claims’ poor sourcing.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/nbc-unintentionally-dunks-on-the-ruling-class-over-

A recent piece shows the mercifully pathetic nature and irrelevance of U.S. white supremacists, while revealing the threat posed by a Ruling Class targeting millions of Americans.

To the Ruling Class’s communications arm doing business as the corporate media, America is besieged by white bigotry, not a nation that has more successfully integrated diverse peoples into a common culture of liberty and justice than any other in human history. It is imperative to explain away any and all evidence to the contrary. It is also critical to champion one’s political allies in this project, no matter their own potential villainy.

NBC News recently provided a textbook example of such mendacity, and odiousness, while inadvertently undermining the favored Ruling Class narrative of American deplorability in covering “White Lives Matter” rallies that never materialized.

As I argue, actual white supremacists, as Zadrozny’s reporting shows, mercifully seem to lack power in this country—contra the popular narrative, which I challenge in the piece.

Consider:

by an authoritative measure of national animus like the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) hate crime statistics, the latest annual figures from 2019 show some 8,812 victims of bias, 4,930 of which suffered from single-bias incidents concerning race/ethnicity/ancestry, in a country of 330 million, where the number of interactions between different peoples are virtually infinite. To put these numbers in perspective, the FBI reported nearly two times as many estimated murders—16,425—as hate crimes in 2019. Victims of all hate crimes, whether classified as concerning one, or multiple biases, represented .00269 percent of the total U.S. population.

Now, what of the perpetrators of these crimes? Of the 6,406 known offenders identified in 2019, 23.9 percent were black or African American, almost two times the 13 percent of the country this population comprises. That is, blacks committed disproportionately more hate crimes than did those of any other race, including whites, who committed 52.5 percent of all hate crimes while comprising 60 percent of the country.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-learning-they-spread?token=eyJ1c2V

The most significant Trump-era alliance is between corporate outlets and security state agencies, whose evidence-free claims they unquestioningly disseminate.

That Russia placed “bounties” on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan was one of the most-discussed and consequential news stories of 2020. It was also, as it turns out, one of the most baseless — as the intelligence agencies who spread it through their media spokespeople now admit, largely because the tale has fulfilled and outlived its purpose.

The saga began on June 26, 2020, when The New York Times announced that unnamed “American intelligence officials” have concluded that “a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops.” The paper called it “a significant and provocative escalation” by Russia. Though no evidence was ever presented to support the CIA’s claims — neither in that original story nor in any reporting since — most U.S. media outlets blindly believed it and spent weeks if not longer treating it as proven, highly significant truth. Leading politicians from both parties similarly used this emotional storyline to advance multiple agendas.

The story appeared — coincidentally or otherwise — just weeks after President Trump announced his plan to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2020. Pro-war members of Congress from both parties and liberal hawks in corporate media spent weeks weaponizing this story to accuse Trump of appeasing Putin by leaving Afghanistan and being too scared to punish the Kremlin. Cable outlets and the op-ed pages of The New York Times and Washington Post endlessly discussed the grave implications of this Russian treachery and debated which severe retaliation was needed. “This is as bad as it gets,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Then-candidate Joe Biden said Trump’s refusal to punish Russia and his casting doubt on the truth of the story was more proof that Trump’s “entire presidency has been a gift to Putin,” while Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) demanded that, in response, the U.S. put Russians and Afghans “in body bags.”

What was missing from this media orgy of indignation and militaristic demands for retaliation was an iota of questioning of whether the story was, in fact, true.