New York Times Clears National Security Stories with the Government Before Publication. Source: New York Times

New York Times response to Donald Trump's attack on the Times story revealing recent U.S. cyber-attacks against Russia

by Thomas Neuburger

The New York Times has just admitted that it clears national security stories with the government before it publishes them. We've already known this occurred some of the time — see "How the NY Times & U.S. Government Worked Together to Suppress James Risen’s Post-9/11 Reporting." It now looks like it occurs most of the time, if not all of the time.

The source for the revelation, at least in the current instance, is the New York Times.

This find is courtesy of Ben Norton, writing at Grayzone:

The New York Times has publicly acknowledged that it sends some of its stories to the US government for approval from “national security officials” before publication.

This confirms what veteran New York Times correspondents like James Risen have said: The American newspaper of record regularly collaborates with the US government, suppressing reporting that top officials don’t want made public.

On June 15, the Times reported that the US government is escalating its cyber attacks on Russia’s power grid. According to the article, “the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively,” as part of a larger “digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow.”

In response to the report, Donald Trump attacked the Times on Twitter, calling the article “a virtual act of Treason.”

The New York Times PR office replied to Trump from its official Twitter account, defending the story and noting that it had, in fact, been cleared with the US government before being printed.

“Accusing the press of treason is dangerous,” the Times communications team said. “We described the article to the government before publication.”

“As our story notes, President Trump’s own national security officials said there were no concerns,” the Times added.

The reason always given for the government suppressing a national security story is, of course, that lives will be put in danger, even when they won't. The following is Risen, as reported by Norton, talking about this arrangement between Times editors and the government, an arrangement he once went along with, but then grew to distrust:

Risen detailed how his editors had been “quite willing to cooperate with the government.” ... There is an “informal arrangement” between the state and the press, Risen explained, where US government officials “regularly engaged in quiet negotiations with the press to try to stop the publication of sensitive national security stories.”

“At the time, I usually went along with these negotiations,” the former New York Times reported [sic] said. He recalled an example of a story he was writing on Afghanistan just prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Then-CIA Director George Tenet called Risen personally and asked him to kill the story.

“He told me the disclosure would threaten the safety of the CIA officers in Afghanistan,” Risen said. “I agreed.”

Risen said he later questioned whether or not this was the right decision. “If I had reported the story before 9/11, the CIA would have been angry, but it might have led to a public debate about whether the United States was doing enough to capture or kill bin Laden,” he wrote. “That public debate might have forced the CIA to take the effort to get bin Laden more seriously.”

This dilemma led Risen to reconsider responding to US government requests to censor stories. “And that ultimately set me on a collision course with the editors at the New York Times,” he said.

This practice applied not only after 9/11 and the Iraq War, but long afterward as well:

In the lead-up to the Iraq War, Risen frequently “clashed” with Times editors because he raised questions about the US government’s lies. But his stories “stories raising questions about the intelligence, particularly the administration’s claims of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, were being cut, buried, or held out of the paper altogether.”

The Times’ executive editor Howell Raines “was believed by many at the paper to prefer stories that supported the case for war,” Risen said.

In another anecdote, the former Times journalist recalled a scoop he had uncovered on a botched CIA plot. The Bush administration got wind of it and called him to the White House, where then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice ordered the Times to bury the story.

Risen said Rice told him “to forget about the story, destroy my notes, and never make another phone call to discuss the matter with anyone.”

“The Bush administration was successfully convincing the press to hold or kill national security stories,” Risen wrote. And the Barack Obama administration subsequently accelerated the “war on the press.”

I've written before that the U.S. is one of the most heavily propagandized nations in the world, most recently here ("ICE is Paying Millions to Spy on People’s Communications"). This propaganda takes many forms, from the soft propaganda of military intervention into movie content (see this criticism of the film Pitch Perfect 3, "I Paid To See A Movie About Singing. I Got Ninety Minutes Of Pentagon Propaganda.") to the hard propaganda of former generals, admirals and security officials masquerading as "independent analysts" on news programs where they usually advocate for unpopular government policies, like war (see Lee Fang's "Who’s Paying the Pro-War Pundits?" and "Pentagon military analyst program" at SourceWatch).

We now know, if there was any doubt, that those heroes of the #Resistance at the New York Times, by their own admission, have been fully folded into the government's media "information" project. Good to know.

Ignoring the Elected President

Side note: It's understandable, in a way, that in the current panicky environment, administration employees are treating the president, their boss, as someone to withhold information from, as they did in the case of the U.S. military's cyber-intrusion into the Russian power grid. Again, according to the New York Times (emphasis added):

Two administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place “implants” — software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid.

Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction — and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials[.]

Is this a precedent, though, we want to cheer or set? The act of cementing in place an American Praetorian Guard with a publicly sanctioned veto over decisions of an elected head of state, once done, won't be undone easily.

Is this what we want our next constitution to become, a state in which it's OK for elected officials to be publicly frustrated by their unelected subordinates? One must consider the future before radically altering the present.

I've said this before, but consider: If a President Bernie Sanders wanted better relations with Russia and North Korea, and went about it in a smart, safe way; wanted to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. by smartly but radically renegotiating our billionaire- and corporate-friendly trade deals; wanted to radically reduce spending on the national security apparatus, on our endless wars, and spend instead on government-provided services like Medicare for All (which, by the way, would devastate several powerful, well-funded industries and bipartisan donor constituencies) ... and for good measure, started jailing bankers again...

...if a President Sanders attempted to do all that, what would be the response of the national security apparatus, guardians of the status quo? Whom would they serve, the billionaire owners of the established, corrupt-but-lucrative bipartisan state, or the Sanders-led revolutionary FDR-style government they're constitutionally sworn to defend?

How much would be kept from him by "his" administration? How many who work for him would openly block his agenda, using the security state's propaganda resources (such as the New York Times) to defend their actions?

How much of the future are we willing to sacrifice in order to fix the present? After all, if Establishment leaders really want to be rid of President Trump, there's a fully constitutional method for doing it — impeachment. Instead they seem to be choosing these anti-constitutional methods.

This is a plan that will backfire. Once a nation opens the door to rule by its security elite, as the U.S. has increasingly done, the guardians and beneficiaries of that door almost never let it be closed.

Word to the wise.
 

Longtime Reporter Leaves NBC, Accuses Media of "Lionizing Destructive Organizations" Like the FBI

The Praetorian Guard declares a cowering Claudius emperor after murdering Caligula (from a painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema)

by Thomas Neuburger

I’d argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn’t missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism.
      —William Arkin, former NBC war reporter

File this under "Praetorian Guard Watch."

William Arkin is a longtime NBC reporter, primarily covering war and national security news. He recently quit NBC, offering his reasons in an online "departure letter." There he castigated the media's coverage of the president, calling them at one point "prisoners of Donald Trump."

"Of course he is an ignorant and incompetent impostor," Arkin wrote. "And yet I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn’t get out Syria? We shouldn’t go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? Even on Russia, though we should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really earn for the Cold War? And don’t even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?"

Please notice the last sentences above, about the growth in reputation — and irreproachability — of the national security state: "And don’t even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?"

Then he gave an interview to Democracy Now's Amy Goodman. Part of that interview went this way (emphasis mine throughout):

AMY GOODMAN: So, you talked about the people who populate the networks as pundits, and you’ve been a fierce critic of the national security state, or at least understanding who it is who is explaining things to us.

Reading from Politico, “Former CIA Director John Brennan … the latest superspook,” they said, “to be reborn as a TV newsie. He just cashed in at NBC News as a 'senior national security and intelligence analyst' and served his first expert views … on Meet the Press. The Brennan acquisition seeks to elevate NBC to spook parity with CNN, which employs former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director Michael Hayden in a similar capacity.

Other, lesser-known national security veterans thrive under TV’s grow lights. Almost too numerous to list, they include Chuck Rosenberg, former acting DEA administrator, chief of staff for FBI Director James Comey, and counselor to former FBI Director Robert Mueller; Frank Figliuzzi, former chief of FBI counterintelligence; Juan Zarate, deputy national security adviser under Bush, at NBC; and Fran Townsend, homeland security adviser under Bush.”

And it goes on and on and on. These are now the pundits. And so, when you have a situation like President Trump announcing he will immediately withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and halve the troops that are in Afghanistan, you have this massive attack on him that’s actually led by the permanent national security state under the guise of pundits on television.

At this point Arkin is selling the idea, with which I agree, that the security state has become so powerful that it's able to use the news networks, who compete for "spook parity," as their sales platforms.

But in doing so, he's making another point as well, if not mindfully — that the national security state is approaching (or has approached) the status of a latter-day Praetorian Guard, a military organization without whose approval no one can become or remain president.

He gets there in stages. First, this:

WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, I think that you’ve—I mean, what you said stands for itself, Amy. But I would add to it that I think the real crisis is that when we have a panel discussion on television, in the mainstream press, and even in the mainstream newspapers, we don’t populate that panel with people who are in opposition. We have a single war party in the United States, and it’s the only one that is given voice. ...

And I think that probably because of the phenomenon of Donald Trump—let’s just be honest about it—really what we see on TV now is former Obama administration officials masquerading as analysts who are nonpartisan, when in fact they are partisan.

Brennan, Clapper (he who lied to Congress but, as an approved insider, was forgiven), and a number of other "former Obama administration officials" are not just partisan, pro-endless war advocates "masquerading as analysts"; they are "analysts" working to delegitimize Donald Trump. Whether not Trump is a legitimate president, that "partisan superspooks" are uncritically accepted as part of the takedown operation should be concerning.

Arkin seems to recognize this. Later in the interview he's asked to explain his comment about the FBI, which I noted above.

AMY GOODMAN: And, William Arkin, you also write, “don’t [even] get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?”

WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, there’s a crazy collateral damage of Donald Trump. And that is that there are a lot of liberals in America who believe that the CIA and the FBI is going to somehow save the country from Donald Trump.

Well, I’m sorry, I’m not a particular fan of either the CIA or the FBI. And the FBI, in particular, has a deplorable record in American society, from Martin Luther King and the peace movements of the 1960s all the way up through Wen Ho Lee and others who have been persecuted by the FBI.

And there’s no real evidence that the FBI is either—is that competent of an institution, to begin with, in terms of even pursuing the prosecutions that it’s pursuing. But yet we lionize them. We hold them up on a pedestal, that somehow they are the truth tellers, that they’re the ones who are getting to the bottom of things, when there’s just no evidence that that’s the case.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you mean by the “creeping fascism of homeland security”?

WILLIAM ARKIN: You know, I was against the creation of the Homeland Security Department in 2003, to begin with. First of all, don’t like the word. “Homeland security” sounds a little bit brown-shirty to me. But, second of all, it was created to be a counterterrorist organization, a domestic counterterrorist organization. And all during the Obama administration, we heard Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, saying, “You know, we are counterterrorism.” But since then, we’ve seen they’re creeping into cybersecurity. We’ve seen them creeping into election security. We’ve seen ICE and TSA become the second and third largest federal law enforcement agencies in the country. And so, now homeland security sort of has become a domestic intelligence agency with really an unclear remit, really with broad powers that we don’t fully understand.

And we tend, again, to say “Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Department.” Donald Trump couldn’t find the Department of Homeland Security if somebody set him on the streets of New York—of Washington, D.C. So it’s not Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Department. It’s our Homeland Security Department. And I think it’s important for us to recognize that this is a department that is really operating on its own behalf and out of control.

I'd like you to ask yourself this. If a President Bernie Sanders wanted better relations with Russia and North Korea, and went about it in a smart, safe way; wanted to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. by smartly but radically renegotiating our billionaire- and corporate-friendly trade deals; wanted to radically reduce spending on the national security apparatus, on our endless wars, and spend instead on government-provided services like Medicare for All (which, by the way, would devastate several powerful, well-funded industries and bipartisan donor constituencies) ... and for good measure, started jailing bankers again...

...if a President Sanders attempted to do all that, what would be the response of the national security apparatus, guardians of the status quo? Whom would they serve, the billionaire owners of the established, corrupt-but-lucrative bipartisan state, or the Sanders-led revolutionary FDR-style government they're constitutionally sworn to defend?

As a reminder: The Praetorian Guard was an elite unit of the Imperial Roman army whose members served as personal bodyguards to the Roman emperors. ... [T]he Guard became notable for its intrigue and interference in Roman politics, to the point of overthrowing emperors and proclaiming their successors. In 312, the Guard was disbanded by Constantine the Great [after defeating them and their latest declared emperor at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge].

The Guard murdered Caligula — insane, incompetent and dangerous — and declared Claudius emperor, the first of its many "interferences." After Claudius was poisoned, they transferred allegiance to Nero. It went like this for centuries (of which we have none, by the way).

The Guard had the power to "make or break emperors." Are we growing our own Praetorian Guard, or giving them leave to grow, under cover of their anti-Trump "resistance"? If I were one of the national security superspooks, I'd want nothing better than to be welcomed — and washed clean — by acceptance into that well-praised effort. Doors would open publicly that before were open only in secret.

In that sense, Trump may be even more dangerous than he's now considered to be. What he may do while still with us may be frightful to consider. But the form of government he leaves behind may be worse, especially if he cements in the public mind the rightness of superspooks acting as new-minted kingmakers. Sanders supporters, take note.
 

The Resistance, the #Resistance and Harvey Weinstein

Offered ironically. The roughest waters lie ahead of us.

by Gaius Publius

"For certain of their leaders, modern-day liberalism is a way of rationalizing and exercising class power."

     –Thomas Frank

The real resistance occurred in 2016. It failed in both parties.

     –Yours truly

There's something greatly troubling about what the media-fronted #Resistance has morphed into, but I'm having trouble writing about it (it's lightly touched here: "A Nation in Crisis, Again"). Partly the problem is the marshaling of pages of proof; partly the problem is the unstoppable train wreck that's coming. Perhaps I should write about the train wreck instead.

After all, as noted in the link above, "No Praetorian Guard, once it grows muscular, reverts back to a simple barracks unit just because new leadership arrives." And the anti-Trump leadership in both parties is growing us a Praetorian Guard, if we don't have one already. You may be cheering it onward as we speak, depending on the latest lashings from former and current security state personnel, but what you're cheering, if you do, enables an unelected, uncontrolled and muscular security state, one you've certainly been appalled by in many other contexts.

Trump will go; but the unelected state grows only stronger, now with help from the #Resistance. Do you see the dilemma? How to write about this to a nation in love with what it will come, but only later, to hate?

How Principled Is the #Resistance?

Another troubling aspects of the "professional resistance" — for example, the MSNBC version, which constantly offers the worst of the New Dems and neoliberals for cheers by the anti-Trump crowd — is that I suspect it's not at all principled.

For example, the charge "Russia's attack on our election is an act of war" has been made and platformed daily for almost a year — spoken by those for whom it would be heresy to say that U.S. interferences in elections around the world are also "acts of war."

As one of far too many examples, consider Honduras:

At the beginning of Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State in 2009, the Honduran military ousted democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya in a coup d’etat. The United Nations condemned the military coup and the Organization of American States suspended Honduras from its membership, calling for Zelaya’s reinstatement. Instead of joining the international effort to isolate the new regime, Clinton’s State Department pushed for a new election and decided not to declare that a military coup had occurred.

“If the United States government declares a coup, you immediately have to shut off all aid, including humanitarian aid, the Agency for International Development aid, the support that we were providing at that time for a lot of very poor people,” Clinton said when asked about Honduras in April. “So, our assessment was, we will just make the situation worse by punishing the Honduran people if we declare a coup and we immediately have to stop all aid for the people, but we should slow walk and try to stop anything that the government could take advantage of, without calling it a coup.”

Clinton said that she didn’t want Zelaya returning to power. “Zelaya had friends and allies, not just in Honduras, but in some of the neighboring countries, like Nicaragua and that we could have had a terrible civil war that would have been just terrifying in its loss of life.”

Emails that have since surfaced show that Clinton and her team worked behind the scenes to fend off efforts by neighboring democracies through the Organization of American States to restore the elected president to power.

Is this also a declaration of war by the U.S. against Honduras? Did the U.S. declare war on Iran in 1953 when the CIA unseated the democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh?

The answer to all these question may well be Yes. But would the pro-Clinton hosts and guests at MSNBC, of which there are many, say so? Especially if Clinton herself were to be tarred with that same brush? Using Trump-Russia logic, would Rachel Maddow charge Clinton with abetting an "act of war" against Honduras? Hardly likely.

As I said, I suspect the "professional resistance" to Donald Trump is not at all principled, but opportunistic and entirely one-sided, however right or wrong that one side might be.

The Failed Electoral Revolution of 2016

All this has led me to wonder what the goal of this professional #Resistance really is. The Restoration of Democracy to America? Or the Restoration of Mainstream Democrats — the anti-Sanders, anti-progressive, "you can't have that" crowd — to power again?

If just the latter, the nation may sink more slowly beneath the neoliberal waves than it would under solid Republican rule, a plus to many people's way of thinking, but progressives will still have an enemy who hates all they stand for, armed, enabled and in the field against them. Does strengthening the professional, media-curated #Resistance, without at the same time fighting to dethrone the Clintonists and Obamists actively moved into its front ranks, serve either the cause of progressivism or, given the increasing power of the unelected state, the interest of American democracy? One has to wonder.

The real Resistance, of course, occurred in 2016, in that year's electoral revolt against the money-bought in both parties, and it failed in both parties. Mainstream Democrats successfully fended off the actual populist in their race, Bernie Sanders, whom they hate even to this day. Mainstream Republicans successfully elected their "populist," the fake swamp-drainer Donald Trump, and his voters are getting nothing they wanted in terms of relief from the relentless greed and austerity they rebelled against.

The nation, meanwhile, is left with a still-unsatisfied populist anger, waiting like an abscess to erupt. What form that will take in 2018 and 2020 is anyone's guess. Failed revolutions, like bad meals, often come back stronger.

The #Resistance, Mainstream Democrats and Harvey Weinstein

Who are these mainstream Democrats? According to Thomas Frank, they're Harvey Weinstein:

Let us now consider the peculiar politics of Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced movie producer. Today Weinstein is in the headlines for an astonishing array of alleged sexual harassment and assaults, but once upon a time he was renowned for something quite different: his generous patronage of liberal politicians and progressive causes.

This leading impresario of awful was an enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. He was a strong critic of racism, sexism and censorship. He hosted sumptuous parties to raise money for the fight against Aids.

In 2004 he was a prominent supporter of a women’s group called “Mothers Opposing Bush”. And in the aftermath of the terrorist attack against the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, he stood up boldly for freedom of the press. Taking to the pages of Variety, Weinstein announced that “No one can ever defeat the ability of great artists to show us our world.”

But lest you think Frank is tarring the Clintonist-Obamist wing of the Party with Weinstein in a guilt-by-association manner, he digs deeper (emphasis mine):

Most people on the left think of themselves as resisters of authority, but for certain of their leaders, modern-day liberalism is a way of rationalizing and exercising class power. Specifically, the power of what some like to call the “creative class”, by which they mean well-heeled executives in industries like Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

Worshiping these very special people is the doctrine that has allowed Democrats to pull even with Republicans in fundraising and that has buoyed the party’s fortunes in every wealthy suburb in America.

That this strain of liberalism also attracts hypocrites like Harvey Weinstein, with his superlative fundraising powers and his reverence for “great artists”, should probably not surprise us. Remember, too, that Weinstein is the man who once wrote an essay demanding leniency for Roman Polanski, partially on the grounds that he too was a “great artist”.

Harvey Weinstein seemed to fit right in.

And then the meat of Frank's argument:

This is a form of liberalism that routinely blends self-righteousness with upper-class entitlement. That makes its great pronouncements from Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons. That routinely understands the relationship between the common people and showbiz celebrities to be one of trust and intimacy.

Countless people who should have known better are proclaiming their surprise at Harvey Weinstein’s alleged abuses. But in truth, their blindness is even more sweeping than that. They are lost these days in a hall of moral mirrors, weeping tears of admiration for their own virtue and good taste.

Is the anti-Trump #Resistance, the professional broadcast version with its behind-the-scenes security state actors, simply setting us up for a Restoration of those — a Pence, a Biden, or another darling of our dual mainstream parties — who "weep tears of admiration for their own virtue" as they tank or attempt to co-opt the next Bernie Sanders, or re-destroy the last one? Stay tuned. The answer is coming soon.

And if they do, will America weep tears of thanks, or something else?

GP