Where is the Digital Watergate Anti-Trump Propaganda Campaign Going?

By Daniel Espinosa Winder

The Russians are coming! Once again, the structural bias of the American news media in favor of the ‘official version’ turns them into a propaganda tool. Intelligence sources point out Russian interference in recent elections. However, WikiLeaks-related sources say the Democratic Party’s mail leak was the working of a whistle-blower within that institution.

“Experts point out…”, “Specialists agree…”, “There is a consensus among intelligence agencies …” While the plot’s been cooking for several months now, it was the DNC leaks and Hillary Clinton’s subsequent defeat against Donald Trump what finally put the ‘serious’ press, mainly the Washington Post and the New York Times, working in its propagandistic role: ‘the Russians are trying to destroy American democracy’, they say.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a key tool of the US executive, was created in 1947 and has since been involved in more than a dozen coups, attempted assassinations, and a long list of covert operations around the world. However, this record does not seem to matter to the American corporate press, which continues uncritically channeling its official statements.

Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Goulart in Brazil, Allende in Chile, are just some of the leaders in the long list of CIA successful hits. Where it did not operate directly, as in Iraq in 2003, the CIA fabricated intelligence information indispensable to justify military aggression, with the dire consequences already known to the world.

Now they have brought it home: they don’t like Trump and little more than a month away from January the 20th, intelligence reports, full of circumstantial evidence and ‘official’ opinions, have already caused the New York Times to begin comparing the alleged incursion of Russian hackers into the Democratic mailing servers with Watergate, the incident that saw Richard Nixon’s departure from the White House in 1972.

However, indications that this is all about the working of a whistleblower, probably within the Democratic Party, and not an army of Russian hackers, seems more convincing:

“I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they’re certainly not Russians, he’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; they are two different things. If what the CIA says is true, and their statements refer to people they know is related to the Russian state, they would arrest someone if he was inside the United States … (who) has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers or extraditing Hackers. They just do not have any knowledge”. (CIA Concludes Russia Interfered to Help Trump Win Election, the Guardian, 12/10/16)

This insistence on involving the Russians was at first useful to divert attention from the contents of John Podesta’s and DNC’s mails, but now we see it mutate into something far more dangerous, with monolithic support from mass media, as every time their masters smell blood, the New York Times and the Washington Post are dedicating front pages to it and the world’s corporate media is going along. But where is this going?

As Craig Murray points out, when the media speak of ‘credible’ sources, and all this Russian charade is based on this blind trust in American officials, what it is saying is that they are establishment sources, for whom presenting solid evidence has been always optional.

In a statement to the Daily Mail, Murray, a former United Kingdom ambassador to Uzbekistan, said he was the one to receive the documents from a Democratic Party employee in Washington, after the boycott suffered by Bernie Sanders in the primaries, which ended in the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and caused the condemnation by many operatives and sympathizers of the Democratic Party.

This kind of renewal of the 50’s McCarthyism was carried out on several fronts, one of vital importance being referred to the alarm regarding the proliferation of ‘false news’. The Washington Post published an article on November 24, citing the findings of an organization called Propornot, an anonymous group that drew up a list of 200 media devoted to ‘Russian propaganda’ and ‘false news’.

Propornot’s analysis against these media was made using a methodology that would embarrass even the laziest of school boys, since no real association was necessary with the Russian State: they simply incorporated the vast majority of alternative journalism blogs that had something critical say about US foreign policy, which generated the univocal rejection of both mainstream and independent journalism and a later clarifying note by the WP.

When the media that ‘set the agenda’, such as the Washington Post, The New York Times or CNN, publish an article, the world’s media follows obediently. What we observe, in short, is a transmission of information based on a questionable concept of authority, not facts.

Let us remember Iraq. At the inaugural rally of President George W. Bush’s (January 30, 2001) the issue of removing Saddam Hussein was put at the top of the list, as recalled by former US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill:

“It was about finding a way to do it. The president said, ‘Go find me a way to do this.”

That’s where the CIA comes in. The American anthropologist David Price has studied the agency for two decades and agrees with former agent Philip Agee that the CIA is: “the secret police of American capitalism.” In addition, he believes that Trump is embracing political allies that would point to a strengthening of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to the detriment of the CIA.

An interesting month awaits us and Trump would do well in avoid trips to Dallas.

Editor’s Notes: Daniel Espinosa Winder (35) lives in Caraz, a small city in the Andes of Peru. He graduated in Communication Sciences in Lima and started researching mainstream media and more specifically, propaganda. His writings are a critique of the role of massive media in our society. He currently edits the Spanish section of The Greanville Post.

Photograph one from the archive of James Vaughan; photograph three by Victor Vandijk; photograph four from the archive of Nexusnovum; photograph five by Mark Zwolanek; photograph seven by Gilbert Mercier; and photograph eight from the archive of Van Gaalen.