Figures, Institutions Tracking "Fake News" and Russian Meddling Have Dark Backgrounds in Counter-Terror Industry
As Russia is beginning to overtake Islamic terrorism as the chief enemy of the United States in the eyes of the government and the mainstream media, many of the same figures and organisations that made a name for themselves as "terrorism experts" in previous years are now presenting themselves and each other as the go-to authorities on disinformation and "fake news." Many of these individuals also have a history of repression of anarchist and left-wing forces.
Many have used the term "terrorism gold rush" to describe the cottage industry of think tanks, senior fellows, and private corporations that arose in the United States after the events of September 11, 2001. In fact, the "terrorism industry," to use the title of Edward Herman's 1989 book, goes back much further than that, originating in the late 1970s alongside the think-tank boom itself, with organisations such as AEI, the Heritage Foundation, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Foreign Affairs Institute, and countless others getting a large amount of their early publicity from "counter-terrorism."
The public faces of these groups, from Michael Ladeen to Claire Sterling to Benjamin Netanyahu, were a common site on the front pages of newspapers and on TV in the United States during the 1980s. Sterling even received an issue of the New York Times Magazine devoted to her "research," which, along with the other figures mentioned above, promoted the line that the Soviet Union was behind all (or nearly all) terrorism globally. This narrative was reproduced in popular novels and eventually formed the foreign policy of the incoming Reagan administration.
Today, the spectre of "fake news" and "disinformation" has gripped the American political class in a similar vein to terrorism. And now, from pundits like Clint Watts to private corporations like Google, many ex-terrorism experts are jumping on the newest, most enticing bandwagon.
The two topics have more connecting them than what one may think. A European Parliament study from last fall noted that "Fundamentally, terrorism is communication; acts of terror themselves are propaganda by deed and, as such, strategic communications will always be a central part of counterterrorism."
In his film, "A Very Heavy Agenda," documentarian Robbie Martin describes in detail how many US think-tanks, such as the Project for the New American Century, have effectively been re-founded as bipartisan anti-Russian groups. Perhaps not surprisingly, the same people who said that the USSR was behind all terror as well as disinformation directed at the West find it easy and even natural to refer to Putin's Russia (or Russia's Putin) as the puppetmaster behind all alleged fake news.
The alleged academic Clint Watts, a member of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a CIA-aligned counter-terror group with McCarthyite origins, also got his start in "counter-terrorism," studying al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist groups. Now, he acts as a media pitchman for the Hamilton68 Dashboard. This tool, essentially a blacklist, is hosted by the Alliance For Securing Democracy, and recently featured Antifa and Afrin among their list of "Russian propaganda topics."
The Alliance for Securing Democracy is itself a project of the German Marshall Fund, a NATO-aligned think tank set up at a time when left-wing "terrorist" groups such as the Red Army Faction poised a threat to the transatlantic relationship. The GMF has more recently published hundreds of articles on terrorism and acted as a conduit to restore German trust in the American alliance after the revelations of Edward Snowden were exposed to the public.
According to Max Blumenthal in an article for AlterNet's Grayzone Project, Watts also has ties to Andrew Weisburd, a right-wing extremist counter-terror blogger, who targeted and systematically closed down pro-Palestine, anarchist, and anti-war websites, including (at least partially) Indymedia Palestine and recently blogged on "Kremlin Trolls," and "Russian Active Measures," using a 1980s Cold War-era term that has re-acquired popularity in the American press.
Private tech companies and social media platforms previously working to remove terrorist "extremist content" from their platforms are now also drinking at the anti-disinformation watering hole. Google, a member of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism has used Jigsaw, its subsidiary behind the "Redirect Method" (a project designed to direct potential ISIS recruits to anti-ISIS content), to detect and derank what it deems to be fake news. Another Google subsidiary, Kaggle, is now providing statistics on "fake news" to NATO.
The Global Forum itself has partnered with groups like the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which wrote up a report on Kremlin fake news in last year's German election, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which is now producing reports on the alleged threat of Russian disinformation and has gone so far as to have contributed editorials to the Washington Post suggesting that Russian fake news could undermine the independence of the American court system.
Even Robert Mueller, whose prosecution of 13 Russian troll operators has made him a darling of the anti-disinformation industry, gained much of his fame and notoriety from his "anti-terrorism" efforts at the FBI under George W. Bush, where he whitewashed an investigation into an anthrax attack used by the US government, and thus also the Blair government, to paint Saddam Hussein as a rouge leader with weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Environmentalists also remember Mueller as the man behind the "green scare"- a fear campaign against the Earth Liberation Front designed to tie them and other ecologist groups to "terrorism." It is also widely known among radicals that the FBI described "environmental extremism" as the number one terrorist threat just before the 9/11 attacks.
While many media outlets in America, Great Britain, and other NATO countries have pushed the threat posed by fake news to the top of their priority list, few have bothered to notice the irony that some of the very sources they are citing themselves follow the hallmarks of misinformation, which according to the GMFUS, includes the repetition of the same content by interlocking sources, the spread of disinformation from its original sources to more credible outlets, and integrating these narratives in the world of social media.
Many have used the term "terrorism gold rush" to describe the cottage industry of think tanks, senior fellows, and private corporations that arose in the United States after the events of September 11, 2001. In fact, the "terrorism industry," to use the title of Edward Herman's 1989 book, goes back much further than that, originating in the late 1970s alongside the think-tank boom itself, with organisations such as AEI, the Heritage Foundation, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Foreign Affairs Institute, and countless others getting a large amount of their early publicity from "counter-terrorism."
The public faces of these groups, from Michael Ladeen to Claire Sterling to Benjamin Netanyahu, were a common site on the front pages of newspapers and on TV in the United States during the 1980s. Sterling even received an issue of the New York Times Magazine devoted to her "research," which, along with the other figures mentioned above, promoted the line that the Soviet Union was behind all (or nearly all) terrorism globally. This narrative was reproduced in popular novels and eventually formed the foreign policy of the incoming Reagan administration.
The two topics have more connecting them than what one may think. A European Parliament study from last fall noted that "Fundamentally, terrorism is communication; acts of terror themselves are propaganda by deed and, as such, strategic communications will always be a central part of counterterrorism."
In his film, "A Very Heavy Agenda," documentarian Robbie Martin describes in detail how many US think-tanks, such as the Project for the New American Century, have effectively been re-founded as bipartisan anti-Russian groups. Perhaps not surprisingly, the same people who said that the USSR was behind all terror as well as disinformation directed at the West find it easy and even natural to refer to Putin's Russia (or Russia's Putin) as the puppetmaster behind all alleged fake news.
The Alliance for Securing Democracy is itself a project of the German Marshall Fund, a NATO-aligned think tank set up at a time when left-wing "terrorist" groups such as the Red Army Faction poised a threat to the transatlantic relationship. The GMF has more recently published hundreds of articles on terrorism and acted as a conduit to restore German trust in the American alliance after the revelations of Edward Snowden were exposed to the public.
Private tech companies and social media platforms previously working to remove terrorist "extremist content" from their platforms are now also drinking at the anti-disinformation watering hole. Google, a member of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism has used Jigsaw, its subsidiary behind the "Redirect Method" (a project designed to direct potential ISIS recruits to anti-ISIS content), to detect and derank what it deems to be fake news. Another Google subsidiary, Kaggle, is now providing statistics on "fake news" to NATO.
Even Robert Mueller, whose prosecution of 13 Russian troll operators has made him a darling of the anti-disinformation industry, gained much of his fame and notoriety from his "anti-terrorism" efforts at the FBI under George W. Bush, where he whitewashed an investigation into an anthrax attack used by the US government, and thus also the Blair government, to paint Saddam Hussein as a rouge leader with weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
While many media outlets in America, Great Britain, and other NATO countries have pushed the threat posed by fake news to the top of their priority list, few have bothered to notice the irony that some of the very sources they are citing themselves follow the hallmarks of misinformation, which according to the GMFUS, includes the repetition of the same content by interlocking sources, the spread of disinformation from its original sources to more credible outlets, and integrating these narratives in the world of social media.