And make no mistake: the Pentagon has long been in the business of producing fake news and of trolling letters to the editor pages.
Check out these stories:
Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi
Pentagon Paid for Fake 'Al Qaeda' Videos
Pentagon Pundit Scandal Broke the Law
Pentagon Contractor Admits to Attacks on Journalists
Pentagon Ramping Up Public Relations Offensive
Revealed: US Spy Program that Manipulates Social Media
US Media Knew Kosovo Kosovo Official Reports Were Propaganda
Of course, official government propaganda -- that is the production of what is now called "fake news" and the employment of an army of paid Pentagon "trolls" or "sock puppets" to undermine journalists and their supporters online, have continued.
In fact, back during the heat of the Iraq occupation and the Bush/Cheney administration's efforts to lay the groundwork for a police state spying system, I heard from someone at CommonDreams.org that that organization, concerned by the number of trolls who were clogging up their comment section after articles they ran, did an investigation of the ISPs of the trolls and discovered that many of them were originating in the Department of Defense. There were plans to write an expose of this activity, but to the best of my knowledge no such article ever ran.
The most recent egregious effort in that vein was the successful promotion of what appears to have been a Pentagon effort in which the Washington Post obligingly published a screaming page-one headline touting a list of 200 online sites, most of them American, said to be tools of, or "useful idiots" supporting Russian propaganda. The shadowy organization behind that list, called PropOrNot, was allowed to remain anonymous, both in terms of its personnel and its financing, but I was able to determine that at least one participant, whose "analysis" of an article of mine in this publication, reprinted in Counterpunch, was so "appallingly pro-Russian" that it proved Counterpunch itself was a "pro-Russian" publication. The author or the review of my piece, Joel Harding, I discovered after a little research, had been a high-ranking member of the Army's Stratcom headquarters based at Ft. Detrick outside of Washington, DC. This is where the military's Cyberspace Command is based -- Harding's area of expertise.
Here's my expose about the Pentagon's role in that pathetic effort by the Washington Post to return us to the McCarthy era of blacklists and reputation assassination:
Is the Pentagon Behind the Washington Post's McCarthyite Hit on Independent Alternative Journalism?
It wouldn't surprise me to discover that Russia had engaged in some attempts at using social media to sow confusion and conflict in the US during the last election, and during the current divisive Trump presidency, nor would I be surprised if Russia were to make such efforts going forward during the next two election cycles in 2018 and 2020. That's what powerful countries do -- trying to influence events to their advantage. But whether Russia has done or intends to do such things (and the evidence presented by Mueller et all has been pretty pathetic), it needs to be said that the US has definitely been doing them, and in a big way, not just with $100,000 iworth of Facebook ad buys in the course of a year. As Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey admitted in an interview on Fox TV recently, the US has regularly interfered in at least 81 countries' elections since the end of WW!!. Among in those efforts, which also included not just interfering, but actually overthrowing elected governments in places like Guatemala, Iran and Chile, was a major US covert and overt campaign in post-Soviet Russia that helped the epicly corrupt Russian leader Boris Yeltsin win re-election in 2012.
Americans need to take a deep breath. What is happening currently, with Russia putting out fake news on US social media platforms, is not any different from what the Pentagon, and no doubt other US government organizations are doing and have been doing for decades to corruptly influence public opinion. Much of it, like buying ads, is not even illegal, at least for foreign private entities. It should be illegal for US government departments.
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