At a Berlin security conference,
hardline neocon Jamie Fly appeared to claim some credit for the recent
coordinated purge of alternative media.
By Max Blumenthal and Jeb Sprague
This month, Facebook and Twitter
deleted the accounts of hundreds of users, including many alternative media
outlets maintained by American users. Among those wiped out in the coordinated
purge were popular sites that scrutinized police brutality and U.S.
interventionism like The Free Thought Project, Anti-Media, Cop Block and journalists
like Rachel Blevins.
Facebook claimed that these sites had “broken our rules against
spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” However, sites like The Free
Thought Project were verified by Facebook and widely recognized as legitimate
sources of news and opinion. John Vibes, an independent reporter who
contributed to Free Thought,accused Facebook of “favoring mainstream sources and
silencing alternative voices.”
In comments published here for the
first time, a neoconservative Washington insider has apparently claimed a
degree of credit for the recent purge and promised more takedowns in the near
future.
“Russia, China, and other foreign
states take advantage of our open political system,” remarked Jamie Fly, a
senior fellow and director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund.
“They can invent stories that get repeated and spread through different sites.
So we are just starting to push back. Just this last week Facebook began
starting to take down sites. So this is just the beginning.”
Fly went on to complain that “all you
need is an email” to set up a Facebook or Twitter account, lamenting the sites’
accessibility to members of the general public. He predicted a long struggle on
a global scale to fix the situation, and pointed out that to do so would
require constant vigilance.
Fly made these stunning comments to
Jeb Sprague, who is a visiting faculty in sociology at the University of
California-Santa Barbara and co-author of this article. The two spoke during a
lunch break at a conference on Asian security organized by the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin, Germany.
In the tweet below, Fly is the third
person from the left who appears seated at the table.
A rare opportunity to discuss Asian security in Berlin, with an excellent group of experts from the region @SWPBerlin
The remarks by Fly — “we are just
starting to push back” — seemed to confirm the worst fears of the alternative
online media community. If he was to be believed, the latest purge was
motivated by politics, not spam prevention, and was driven by powerful
interests hostile to dissident views, particularly where American state
violence is concerned.
Rise of a neocon cadre
Jamie Fly is an influential foreign
policy hardliner who has spent the last year lobbying for the censorship of
“fringe views” on social media. Over the years, he has advocated for a military
assault on Iran, a regime change war on Syria, and hiking military spending to
unprecedented levels. He is the embodiment of a neoconservative cadre.
Like so many second generation
neocons, Fly entered governmentby burrowing into mid-level positions in George W.
Bush’s National Security Council and Department of Defense.
In 2009, he was appointed director of
the Foreign Policy Initiative(FPI), a rebranded version of Bill Kristol’s Project
for a New American Century, or PNAC. The latter outfit was an umbrella group of
neoconservative activists that first made the case for an invasion of Iraq as
part of a wider project of regime change in countries that resisted
Washington’s sphere of influence.
By 2011, Fly was advancing the next
phase in PNAC’s blueprint by clamoring for military strikes on Iran. “More diplomacy is
not an adequate response,” he argued. A year later, Fly urged the US to “expand its list of targets beyond the
[Iranian] nuclear program to key command and control elements of the Republican
Guard and the intelligence ministry, and facilities associated with other key
government officials.”
Fly soon found his way into the
senate office of Marco Rubio, a neoconservative pet project, assuming a role as
his top foreign policy advisor. Amongst other interventionist initiatives,
Rubio has taken the lead in promoting harsh economic sanctions targeting Venezuela, even advocating for a U.S. military assault on the country. When Rubio’s 2016 presidential
campaign floundered amid a mass revolt of the Republican Party’s middle
American base against the party establishment, Fly was forced to cast about for
new opportunities.
He found them in the paranoid
atmosphere of Russiagate that formed soon after Donald Trump’s shock
election victory.
PropOrNot sparks the alternative
media panic
A journalistic insider’s account of
the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, Shattered, revealed that
“in the days after the election, Hillary declined to take responsibility for
her own loss.” Her top advisers were summoned the following day, according to
the book, “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the
up-and-up … Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”
Less than three weeks after Clinton’s
defeat, the Washington Post’s Craig Timberg published a dubiously sourced report headlined, “Russian propaganda effort helped
spread ‘fake news.'” The article hyped up a McCarthyite effort by a shadowy,
anonymously run organization called PropOrNot to blacklist some 200 American
media outlets as Russian “online propaganda.”
The alternative media outfits on
the PropOrNot blacklist included some of those recently purged by
Facebook and Twitter, such as The Free Thought Project and Anti-Media. Among
the criteriaPropOrNot identified as signs of Russian propaganda
were, “Support for policies like Brexit, and the breakup of the EU and
Eurozone” and, “Opposition to Ukrainian resistance to Russia and Syrian
resistance to Assad.” PropOrNot called for “formal investigations by the U.S.
government” into the outlets it had blacklisted.
According to Craig Timberg, the
Washington Post correspondent who uncritically promoted the media suppression
initiative, Propornot was established by “a nonpartisan collection of
researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.” Timberg
quoted a figure associated with the George Washington University Center for
Cyber and Homeland Security, Andrew Weisburd, and cited a report he wrote with
his colleague, Clint Watts, on Russian meddling.
Timberg’s piece on was PropOrNot was
promoted widely by former top Clinton staffers and celebrated by ex-Obama White House aide Dan Pfeiffer as
“the biggest story in the world.” But after a wave of stinging criticism,
including in the pages of the New Yorker, the article was amended with an editor’s note
stating, “The [Washington] Post… does not itself vouch for the validity of
PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet.”
PropOrNot had been seemingly exposed
as a McCarthyite sham, but the concept behind it — exposing online American
media outlets as vehicles for Kremlin “active measures” — continued to
flourish.
The birth of the Russian bot tracker
By August, a new, and seemingly
related initiative appeared out of the blue, this time with backing from a
bipartisan coalition of Democratic foreign policy hands and neocon Never
Trumpers in Washington. Called the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), the outfit aimed to expose how supposed
Russian Twitter bots were infecting American political discourse with divisive
narratives. It featured a daily “Hamilton 68” online dashboard that highlighted the supposed bot
activity with easily digestible charts. Conveniently, the site avoided naming
any of the digital Kremlin influence accounts it claimed to be tracking.
The initiative was immediately endorsed by John Podesta, the founder of the Democratic Party think tank,
Center for American Progress, and former chief of staff of Hillary Clinton’s
2016 presidential campaign. Julia Ioffe, the Atlantic’s chief Russiagate
correspondent, promoted the bot tracker as “a very cool tool.”
Unlike PropOrNot, the ASD was
sponsored by one of the most respected think tanks in Washington, the German
Marshall Fund, which had been founded in 1972 to nurture the special
relationship between the US and what was then West Germany.
Though the German Marshall Fund did
not name the donors that sponsored the initiative, it hosted a who’s who of
bipartisan national security hardliners on the ASD’s advisory council, providing the endeavor with the patina of
credibility. They ranged from neocon movement icon Bill Kristol to former
Clinton foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan to ex-CIA director Michael
Morrell.
Jamie Fly, a German Marshall Fund
fellow and Asia specialist, emerged as one of the most prolific promoters of
the new Russian bot tracker in the media. Together with Laura Rosenberger, a
former foreign policy aide to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Fly appeared in
a series of interviews and co-authored several op-edsemphasizing the need for a massive social media
crackdown.
During a March 2018 interview on C-Span, Fly complained that “Russian accounts” were “trying
to promote certain messages, amplify certain content, raise fringe views, pit
Americans against each other, and we need to deal with this ongoing problem and
find ways through the government, through tech companies, through broader
society to tackle this issue.”
Yet few of the sites on PropOrNot’s
blacklist, and none of the alternative sites that were erased in the recent
Facebook purge that Fly and his colleagues take apparent credit for, were
Russian accounts. Perhaps the only infraction they could have been accused of
was publishing views that Fly and his cohorts saw as “fringe.”
What’s more, the ASD has been forced
to admit that the mass of Twitter accounts it initially identified as “Russian
bots” were not necessarily bots — and may not have been Russian either.
“I’m not convinced on this bot thing”
A November 2017 investigation by Max Blumenthal, a co-author of this article,
found that the ASD’s Hamilton 68 dashboard was the creation of “a collection of
cranks, counterterror retreads, online harassers and paranoiacs operating with
support from some of the most prominent figures operating within the American
national security apparatus.”
These figures included the same
George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security fellows —
Andrew Weisburd and Clint Watts — that were cited as experts in the Washington
Post’s article promoting PropOrNot.
Weisburd, who has been described as
one of the brains behind the Hamilton 68 dashboard, once maintained a one-man,
anti-Palestinian web monitoring initiative that specialized in doxxing
left-wing activists, Muslims and anyone he considered “anti-American.” More
recently, he has taken to Twitter to spout off murderous and homophobic
fantasies about Glenn Greenwald, the editor of the Intercept — a publication
the ASD flagged without explanation as a vehicle for Russian influence
operations.
Watts, for his part, has testified
before Congress on several occasions to call on the government to “quell information rebellions”
with censorious measures including “nutritional labels” for online media. He
has received fawning publicity from corporate media and been rewarded with a
contributor role for NBC on the basis of his supposed expertise in ferreting
out Russian disinformation.
Clint Watts has urged Congress to
“quell information rebellions”
However, under questioning during a public event by Grayzone contributor
Ilias Stathatos, Watts admitted that substantial parts of his testimony were
false, and refused to provide evidence to support some of his most colorful
claims about malicious Russian bot activity.
In a separate interview with Buzzfeed, Watts appeared to completely disown the Hamilton 68
bot tracker as a legitimate tool. “I’m not convinced on this bot thing,” Watts
confessed. He even called the narrative that he helped manufacture “overdone,”
and admitted that the accounts Hamilton 68 tracked were not necessarily
directed by Russian intelligence actors.
“We don’t even think they’re all
commanded in Russia — at all. We think some of them are legitimately passionate
people that are just really into promoting Russia,” Watts conceded.
But these stunning admissions did
little to slow the momentum of the coming purge.
Enter the Atlantic Council
In his conversation with Sprague, the
German Marshall Fund’s Fly stated that he was working with the Atlantic Council
in the campaign to purge alternative media from social media platforms like
Facebook.
The Atlantic Council is another
Washington-based think tank that serves as a gathering point for
neoconservatives and liberal interventionists pushing military aggression
around the globe. It is funded by NATO and repressive, US-allied governments including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Turkey, as
well as by Ukrainian oligarchs like Victor Pynchuk.
This May, Facebook announced a partnership with the Atlantic Council’s
Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) to “identify, expose, and explain
disinformation during elections around the world.”
The Atlantic Council’s DFRLab is
notorious for its zealous conflation of legitimate online dissent with
illicit Russian activity, embracing the same tactics as PropOrNot and the ASD.
Ben Nimmo, a DFRLab fellow who has
built his reputation on flushing out online Kremlin influence networks, embarked on an embarrassing witch hunt this year that saw
him misidentify several living, breathing individuals as Russian bots or
Kremlin “influence accounts.” Nimmo’s victims included Mariam Susli, a well-known Syrian-Australian social media
personality, the famed Ukrainian concert pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a British pensioner named Ian Shilling.
In an interview with Sky News,
Shilling delivered a memorable tirade against his accusers. “I have no Kremlin
contacts whatsoever; I do not know any Russians, I have no contact with the
Russian government or anything to do with them,” he exclaimed. “I am an
ordinary British citizen who happens to do research on the current neocon wars
which are going on in Syria at this very moment.”
With the latest Facebook and Twitter
purges, ordinary citizens like Shilling are being targeted in the open, and
without apology. The mass deletions of alternative media accounts illustrate
how national security hardliners from the German Marshall Fund and Atlantic
Council (and whoever was behind PropOrNot) have instrumentalized the
manufactured panic around Russian interference to generate public support for a
wider campaign of media censorship.
In his conversation in Berlin with
Sprague, Fly noted with apparent approval that, “Trump is now pointing to
Chinese interference in the 2018 election.” As the mantra of foreign
interference expands to a new adversarial power, the clampdown on voices of
dissent in online media is almost certain to intensify.
As Fly promised, “This is just the
beginning.”
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Jeb Sprague is a visiting faculty at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of “Globalizing the Caribbean:
Political economy, social change, and the transnational capitalist class”
(Temple University Press, 2019), “Paramilitarism and the assault on democracy
in Haiti” (Monthly Review Press, 2012), and is the editor of “Globalization and
transnational capitalism in Asia and Oceania” (Routledge, 2016). He is a
co-founder of the Network for the Critical Studies of Global Capitalism.
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning
journalist and the author of books including best-selling Republican Gomorrah: Inside the
Movement That Shattered the Party, Goliath: Life and Loathing in
Greater Israel, The Fifty One Day War: Ruin and
Resistance in Gaza, and
The Management of Savagery, which will be published later this year by Verso.
He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many
video reports and several documentaries including Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie and the forthcoming Killing
Gaza. Blumenthal founded
the Grayzone Project in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state
of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
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