Het volgende artikel, geschreven door Adam Johnson Op '
FAIR', ontving ik gisteren via Anti-Media.
Johnson betoogt dat het vreemd is te zien hoe de Trump administratie van uur tot uur via een slechte plot de reguliere (massa-) media manipuleert en hoe die media als een kip zonder kop een waanzinnig verhaal overnemen als was het de waarheid...... Kortom: alweer komt een fiks deel van de reguliere media met nepnieuws (of 'fake news' zo u wilt)......................
De Trump administratie heeft 'veiligheidsaanklagers' van justitie opgedragen te zoeken naar alles wat maar stinkt in verband met Iran...... Dit daar de Trump administratie de sancties tegen Iran verder wil opvoeren, maar daar wel een reden voor moet hebben...... Ronduit schandalig natuurlijk, daar de aanklagers worden gebruikt voor een smerig politiek spel van Trump en z'n militaire junta, vandaar ook dat een paar klokkenluiders deze zaak naar buiten brachten.
Behoorlijk vreemd, zeker als je bedenkt dat de Trump administratie Iran zonder enig bewijs beschuldigde van het zich niet houden aan de eerder met Obama gesloten nucleaire deal (de zogenaamde: Iran Deal) en daarop opnieuw sancties instelde. Dit deed de VS zonder overleg te plegen met de andere partijen (zoals de EU) die meewerkten aan het tot stand komen van deze deal (Iran zou afzien van verrijking van uranium, als beloning daarvoor zouden de sancties tegen dat land worden opgeheven)....
En waar gaat hem om beste bezoeker? Wel simpel: men stelt o.a. dat een Iraanse man HBO en dan m.n. haar site van Game of Thrones heeft gehackt....... ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! 'Zo de waard is vertrouwt deze haar gasten', zullen we maar denken, immers welk land zou zo gek zijn daadwerkelijk energie te steken in het hacken van een tv serie??? Juist: alleen de VS!!
Het is als met Noord-Korea dat Sony zou hebben gehackt, een zaak waarvoor nooit de bewijzen boven tafel zijn gekomen......
Zijne kwaadaardigheid Mike Pompeo die momenteel de CIA leidt was eerder al bezig om middels delen uit rapporten aan elkaar te plakken en zo te bewijzen dat Osama Bin Laden en Al Qaida een band hadden/hebben met Iran........ ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! Bin Laden en 'zijn' Al Qaida zijn van soennitische huize en die geloofsrichting in de islam is de doodsvijand van de sjiieten en daarmee van het sjiitische Iran.......
Lullig genoeg geeft dit eens te meer aan dat de VS uit is op oorlog met Iran, daarin werkt de VS samen met de reli-fascistische dictatuur Saoedi-Arabië en de fascistische apartheidsstaat Israël...... NB de 3 grote agressors in het Midden-Oosten, dit in tegenstelling tot Iran!
Lees het volgende ontluisterende verhaal en zie hoe de VS niet alleen het eigen volk bedondert, maar ook de rest van de westerse landen, die alles wat de VS doet en zegt, zelfs als de leugens er dik bovenop liggen, als zaligmakend overnemen:
Trump Administration
Plays Media Like Fiddle on Iran/HBO Hacking Story
Een beeld uit de serie Game of Thrones (waarvan het eerste seizoen ver achterblijft bij de kwaliteit van de latere seizoenen, 'dit zal wel te danken zijn aan hacks van Putin....')
ADAM
JOHNSON
NOVEMBER
24, 2017
It’s rare to see
evidence of an administration plot to manipulate the media unfolding
in real time, but such is the case this week—and thus far,
corporate media have taken the bait hook, line, and sinker.
The Washington
Post reported
Sunday (11/19/17)
that the Trump Justice Department had been ordering national security
prosecutors to single out cases involving Iranian nationals to help
push for new sanctions on Iran. The Post’s
Devlin Barrett, citing Justice Department officials, laid out the
strategy (emphasis added):
Last month, national security prosecutors at the Justice Department were told to look at any ongoing investigations involving Iran or Iranian nationals with an eye toward making them public.
The push to announce Iran-related cases has caused internal alarm, these people said, with some law enforcement officials fearing that senior Justice Department officials want to reveal the cases because the Trump administration would like Congress to impose new sanctions on Iran. A series of criminal cases could increase pressure on lawmakers to act, these people said.
Some federal law enforcement officials have also voiced concerns that announcing the cases, rather than keeping them under seal, could imperil ongoing investigative work or make it harder to catch suspects who might travel out of Iran, according to the people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing investigations.
Here we have several
insiders effectively whistleblowing on the Trump DoJ* that its
national security investigations are being politicized to advance a
hawkish policy agenda. Under a “normal” presidency, this would
likely be a major scandal, but under Scandal-a-Day Trump, it hardly
registered notice.
What’s perhaps more
shocking is that numerous major media outlets—either ignorant of or
indifferent to the Post’s revelations—took the bait,
reporting about an “Iranian” hack of HBO without
noting the Trump DoJ’s cynical motives:
LA
Times (11/21/17): “Iranian
Man Charged With Hacking HBO and
Leaking Game
of Thrones Information”
BuzzFeed (11/21/17): “Let
The Puns Begin: ‘Winter Has Come’ to the Iranian Who
Pirated HBO‘s Game
of Thrones”
Reuters (11/21/17):
“US Prosecutors Charge Iranian in Game
of Thrones Hack”
New
York Daily
News (11/21/17):
“Iranian Hacker Charged With Stealing Game
of Thrones Scripts
to Extort HBO for
$6M in Bitcoin”
Guardian (11/21/17):
“US Prosecutors Charge Iranian With Game
of ThronesHack”
New
York Times (11/21/17):
“Iranian Hacker Charged in HBO Hacking
That Included ‘Game of Thrones’ Script”
All
of these reports were 36–48 hours after the Post broke
the story that the targeting of Iranian nationals was a deliberate
political ploy by Trump to single out their alleged crimes for the
entirely unrelated purposes of stoking a war panic, imposing harsher
sanctions, and doing what the administration has long—and quite
openly—wanted
to do: get out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, otherwise
known as the Iran Deal. But none of these reports mention this
crucial piece of context, context that would put the sensational
headlines about Iranians hijacking our precious pop culture assets
into proper perspective.
Most of the articles had
a throwaway line explaining that Justice wasn’t technically
implicating the Iranian government, but it was heavily implied they
were involved, with citations of the defendant’s “links” to the
Iranian military, and one or two paragraphs devoted to previous
Iranian and North Korean government hacks.
After noting the alleged
hacker had “previously worked as a hacker for the Iranian
military,“ and spending roughly 100 words on historical examples of
government’s hacking, LA Times’ Ryan Faughnder did
note in paragraph 11 that “the indictment did not say the Iranian
government was behind the HBO hack.”
The Daily
News skipped the caveat all together and strongly suggested
the defendant was working on behalf of the Iranian government,
writing he was a “member of the Iran-supported Turk Black Hat
Security team” and “had worked on behalf of the Iranian armed
forces to attack military and nuclear software systems, as well as
Israeli infrastructure.” The DoJ’s reluctant admission that he
had no connection to the government didn’t merit a mention.
One
outlet, NBC
News (11/21/17),
actually added the context of potential DoJ bias after initially
omitting it and hyping up the Iran connection, noting prosecutors
denied the allegations. (The archived version can be seen here.)
Clearly NBC editors
realized this context was crucial. How many other people around the
world have committed similar crimes? How many hacks of this nature
are currently under FBI investigation? If the number is 100 and the
Trump DoJ, under pressure from anti-Iran ideologues in the
administration, selectively highlighted this case to paint a broader
narrative, certainly this would put the story in a whole new light.
This
isn’t to necessarily blame specific journalists writing up the
DoJ’s press conference. It’s possible they missed the Washington
Post’s
report on political corruption at the DoJ on Iran. Certainly, no
reporter can know all relevant reports all the time. But it does
speak to a much broader problem of the media taking FBI press
releases at face value, and declining to contextualize the broader
political implications. (As FAIR has noted
previously—4/1/15, 7/1/15—this
usually manifests in treating every manufactured “terror” plot as
the Lindbergh Baby case.) But to those who do know—and those
covering the case moving forward—certainly the blatant
politicization of Trump administration prosecutions should be put
front and center in any subsequent coverage.
Evidence
of anti-Iran positioning at Justice comes on the heels of Trump’s
CIA head Mike Pompeo cherry-picking
files captured
at the assassination of Osama bin Laden in an effort to link Iran to
the terrorist mastermind and Al Qaeda to Iran—then giving the only
advance copy of this report to a partisan anti-Iran think tank, the
Foundation for Defense of Democracies, for heavy
spin.
It was a highly unusual move that ex-Obama official and ex-CIA
analyst Ned Price argued on Twitter and
in an article in The
Atlantic (11/8/17)
was a clear attempt to undermine Obama’s Iran deal. “The ploy is
transparent despite the fact that the newly released documents don’t
tell us anything we didn’t already know,” Price said on social
media:
What’s not as transparent are the motives of Pompeo, the administration’s leading and most influential Iran hawk…. These moves suggest he’s reverting to the Bush administration’s playbook: Emphasize terrorist ties as a rationale for regime change.
To anyone paying
attention to the bigger picture, the trend is obvious.
Given
the Trump admin’s open and well-documented attempts
to undermine the Iran deal and build up tensions with Iran, any
gestures against the country should, at the very least, be
contextualized as part of this broader propaganda effort—especially
when confirmation of this effort is relayed by DoJ officials
themselves in real time. Thus far, the media is taking DoJ and CIA
moves at face value and not presenting these stories as what they
clearly are: marketing collateral in a broader PR push for sanctions
and potentially war against Iran.
* DoJ: Deaprtment of Justice.
Bea Sutherland
