The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the shift to a digital economy. As health measures required the public to isolate and work from home, technology firms and politicians saw an opportunity: all of a sudden we needed the Internet (and to give away our personal data) in order even to shop for basic groceries. Meanwhile, health passports, of the kind that will be made available to EU citizens on 1 July, introduce the prospect of being tracked, or excluded, based on our ability to produce a QR code. Surveillance capitalism, a term coined by Shoshana Zuboff before the current crisis, has only grown in power.
‘Intelligence sources say’
Did Russia put a bounty on the heads of American soldiers in Afghanistan? US and international media were happy to report a story based on dubious intelligence that was much too good to fact-check.
When a war is going nowhere, those who want to prolong it have several options. They can claim it’s in its final phase, or that giving ground would mean stabbing its soldiers in the back after years of sacrifice. They can predict that retreating from the front will bring chaos, a toppling of the dominoes. The first world war, the Algerian war and the wars in Indochina were all pursued to the bitter end by raising the same spectres: a betrayal of the army by civilians, blindness to an impending apocalypse, the passing of intelligence to the enemy.
But for some years, a different approach has predominated in the US: fake news co-produced by the security services and the liberal press; the most recent forms of this are well-timed, fabricated scoops claiming that the US, that white dove of democracy with angel wings, is being targeted by a Russian plot abroad and extremists at home. And there can be no question of letting them win.
Putin card on Afghanistan
The hawks in Washington have played their Putin card on Afghanistan. Soon after President Trump announced that by 1 May 2021 all American troops would withdraw from the country the US has occupied for 20 years, the New York Times website ran the headline ‘Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill US Troops, Intelligence Says’ (26 June 2020). The White House did not react to this ‘huge escalation of Russia’s so-called hybrid war against the United States’, the scoop’s three authors (who have four Pulitzer prizes between them) reported indignantly, following the line the paper has long pursued, that Trump had ‘an accommodating stance toward Moscow’.
Donald Trump's entire presidency has been a gift to Putin, but this is beyond the pale. It's a betrayal of the most sacred duty we bear, to protect and equip our troops when we send them into harm's wayJoe Biden
Although the Times article offered no proof, the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal repeated it the following day, sparking a media frenzy (1). The scandal had particular impact as the election campaign was in full swing. Because how can any US withdrawal be justified if it is also Vladimir Putin’s favoured outcome? Wouldn’t this be more ‘breathtaking’, ‘sickening’ proof, as MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow put it, of collusion between the White House and Russia?
On the face of it, though, the claim seemed bizarre. Why kill US soldiers when they are on their way out anyway? And why would a bounty policy have such limited impact? (Only 24 American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan in 2019, the year the policy was allegedly launched.) The outrage also smacked of hypocrisy: in the 1980s, the US openly supported Afghan mujahideen, including Osama bin Laden, with hundreds of millions of dollars and Stinger surface-to-air missiles, which they used to kill thousands, not dozens, of Soviet soldiers.
President Trump immediately branded the Times revelation ‘fake news’. It later came out that its source was an anonymous CIA agent, who allegedly got it from the Afghan authorities following the interrogation of a Taliban prisoner. However, the National Security Agency (NSA) was sceptical about the accusation, and the Pentagon refused to corroborate it. The Afghan government had a vested interest in spreading it given that, true or false, the claim could help derail the feared departure of US troops.
In his 23 July video call with Putin, trump made no mention of the claim further fuelling indignation in the Democratic Party, among neocon Republicans, and in the press. Including, of course, the New York Times, though it had had to admit 16 days earlier that ‘there’s a lot still missing from the reports that Russia paid for attacks on American and other coalition forces in Afghanistan.’
‘Appropriate retaliation’
But the hare had been started (2). Republican Senator (and Trump critic) Ben Sasse suggested ‘appropriate retaliation’ would be ‘GRU [Russian intelligence] agents in body bags’. Susan Rice, a key figure in the current Democratic administration, said Trump’s failure to respond to ‘Russian efforts to slaughter American troops in cold blood’ confirmed he was ‘actively advancing our arch adversary’s nefarious interests’. And Joe Biden declared, ‘Donald Trump’s entire presidency has been a gift to Putin, but this is beyond the pale. It’s a betrayal of the most sacred duty we bear as a nation, to protect and equip our troops when we send them into harm’s way.’
A gift to Putin — really? As president, Trump approved missile attacks on Syria (Russia’s ally), the killing of dozens of Russian mercenaries, consignments of anti-tank weapons for Ukraine and a cyber attack on Russia, as well as the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal (to which Russia is a signatory) and from the START treaty between the two nuclear superpowers (3).
No matter. On 1 July, less than a week after the Times scoop, which was immediately picked up by several members of Congress, the House Armed Services Committee voted by 45 to 11 to make the planned withdrawal from Afghanistan subject to a number of conditions that were almost impossible to meet. It then unanimously ratified a military budget of $740bn, three times that of China and 12 times that of Russia.
[Biden] plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat themWall Street Journal
Mission accomplished for the opposition? There’s just one problem: zero factual evidence to corroborate the initial report. In an article on 15 April, the Times had to admit that the US intelligence service ‘assesses [the bounties claim] with low to moderate confidence’. So weak was the claim that it was not even on the Biden administration’s list of grievances when it imposed new sanctions on Russia.
Media myths don’t just concern foreign theatres of operations. They are also used to construct an enemy within, so as to prepare public opinion for repressive legislation. In the 1960s and 1970s, the print and broadcast media relentlessly portrayed civil rights activists — such as the Black Panthers and student radicals — as such a threat to the social order that it warranted their judicial persecution and sometimes liquidation by FBI agents. In a similar vein, the conservative media tirelessly portray the Black Lives Matter movement and ‘antifas’ as a threat to the US. Since Biden’s election, mainstream journalism has added the chilling image of the far-right extremist to the gallery of ‘domestic terrorists’.
False ‘revelation’ repeated
On 8 January, two days after the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters mistakenly convinced that their champion’s election victory had been stolen, the New York Times, citing police sources, published a crucial revelation: ‘Capitol Police Officer Dies from Injuries in Pro-Trump Rampage’.
The officer was Brian Sicknick. During the day, the Times fleshed out the story: ‘He Dreamed of Being a Police Officer, Then Was Killed by a Pro-Trump Mob’, the website reported, adding, ‘On Wednesday, pro-Trump rioters attacked that citadel of democracy, overpowered Mr Sicknick, 42, and struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials. With a bloody gash in his head, Mr Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.’
None of this was true. Sicknick had not been struck and, by the time the Times published its account, Sicknick’s brother had told the ProPublica website that he had received a reassuring text message from his brother on the evening of 6 January: Brian had been tear-gassed twice but was ‘in good shape’. He died a few hours later of a stroke. An autopsy revealed no trace of a blow and the DC chief medical examiner recorded death by natural causes. But the homicidal rage attributed to the insurgents required a fitting victim on the front page, otherwise rightwing rioters would have been the day’s only fatalities. The Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and then most of the world’s media — from The Guardian in the UK to Nepal’s Himalayan Times — repeated the erroneous report without checking it.
On 2 and 3 February 2021, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi arranged for the deceased’s ashes to lie in state at the Capitol Rotunda to mark the officer’s ‘sacrifice’. The president and vice-president paid their respects and his remains were taken to the cemetery in a motorcade escorted by a hundred motorcycles.
The stage-management of this great national release of emotion coincided with another offensive: as soon as the Capitol assailants were dispersed or arrested, president-elect Biden called them ‘domestic terrorists’. Because, the Wall Street Journal reported on 7 January, he had ‘plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he ha[d] been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.’ Three months later, the bill is being studied by the Justice Department, while homeland security officials are working on new surveillance and control methods, which are unlikely to be limited to the far right.
The publication on 19 April of medical reports invalidating the Sicknick murder theory prompted no mea culpa. But rest assured: the fight against fake news remains top priority for the government and the quality press.
Serge Halimi & Pierre Rimbert
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