July 21, 2015

Hiding Its Own Role NYT Publishes Anonymous Officials' Snowden Smears

What do certain U.S. administration officials do when they want to push a line of propaganda out to the world? They call up some willing stenographer from the New York Times. The NYT stenographers guarantee anonymity to the government officials and they certainly do not check the logical or factual plausibility of the fairy tales they are told. Instead they write up what they whatever is said as exclusive and a scoop.

In today's fairy tale, by Eric Schmidt and Ben Hubbard, we are told that the Islamic State leader "takes steps to ensure [his] groups survival".

Funny idea. Why would a group that survived the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the years since under constant, intensive military pressure NOW take steps for its survival? I had imagined it had taken such steps years ago. Otherwise how would it still exist?

But asking real questions is not a NYT journalist's job:

The Islamic State’s reclusive leader has empowered his inner circle of deputies as well as regional commanders in Syria and Iraq with wide-ranging authority, a plan to ensure that if he or other top figures are killed, the organization will quickly adapt and continue fighting, American and Iraqi intelligence officials say. The officials say the leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, delegates authority to his cabinet, or shura council, which includes ministers of war, finance, religious affairs and others.

The Islamic State has deputy leaders which run various different parts of the organization? Wow. How would we ever have known this without anonymous "American and Iraqi intelligence officials" explaining such?

Any bigger organization has a leadership that delegates to deputies who run various parts of the business. That's how people organize and how they have done about anywhere and anytime. Would anyone, and for what reason, have expected something different from the Islamic State? Why then are we presented such a story?

There is nothing really new in the piece. It says that IS is run as a large organization and has somewhat autonomous branches in various countries. That was all well known. But the real agenda of the whole story may be condensed in just one paragraph which stands out as an obvious lie:

The Islamic State has also studied revelations from Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, about how the United States gathers information on militants. A main result is that the group’s top leaders now use couriers or encrypted channels that Western analysts cannot crack to communicate, intelligence and military officials said.

IT IS ALL SNOWDEN'S FAULT say anonymous government officials and the NYT's voice activated tape recorders, aka <I>journalists</I>, write it down and publish it.

But Osama Bin Laden was killed before Snowden left the NSA. Did he use cell phones or did he fear that those would be used to trace him? Have AlQaeda and the Islamic State started to use encryption only after the Snowden revelations? No :

[AlQaeda] ditched cell phones in favor of walkie-talkies and coded names. Information was passed through intermediaries. If someone needed to send an email, it was shielded by highly sophisticated encryption software.

That quote is from 2011, years before Snowden. But protecting communication started even earlier. In 2008 the Taliban in Afghanistan shut down cell phone towers that traced their movements. Such groups always protect their communication because they know that their enemies will use those to find and kill them. There is nothing new about this and whatever Snowden did has nothing to do with that. The NYT stenographers surely know this but they still write down the smears they are told without examining and explaining the actual facts.

And by the way - what secret did Snowden actually publish? He gave NSA papers to reporters and newspaper and they are the ones who selected some and made them public. One of those papers was the New York Times. The sentence inculpating Snowden should thereby have said:

The Islamic State has also studied revelations published by the New York Time about how the United States gathers information on militants.

That the NYT was involved in the same issue that is now used by anonymous officials to smear Snowden is of course not mentioned in the story.

The New York Times fired Judith Miller who wrote down fairy tales told by anonymous administration officials about no existing Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. How was whatever she did different from the stenographing Schmidt and Hubbard are doing in today's piece?

Posted by b on July 21, 2015 at 16:29 UTC | Permalink

Comments