Stephen Karganovic
Annals of corporate whoredom: “Proudly serving the empire and our pocketbooks”
ARSONISTS WHO COULD IGNITE A NUCLEAR CONFLAGRATION
As we attempt to sort out the raging fake news controversy, which has recently acquired particular vigor with the imputation to the President of the United States of treasonous links with hostile foreign interests and the alleged interference of foreigners in the most hallowed, electoral sanctum of our domestic affairs, we should not overlook an ominous pattern. There is a long-standing dishonorable tradition of laying serious charges unsupported by any evidence and it goes back to at least the Yugoslav civil war in the 1990s.
The cynical way in which it is done was explained by James Harff, a director of the Public Relations firm of Rudder Finn, in charge of its Croatian and Bosnian Muslim accounts at the time. (See Appendix below). In a 1993 interview with Jacques Merlino of the French TV2 television network, Harff was brutally frank about it:
“The initial statement is all that counts. Subsequent refutations are of no effect.”
Indeed, we owe Harff an invaluable insight into the unscrupulous functioning of the modern propaganda machinery. Especially when he, being Jewish himself, held up as one of his greatest triumphs his remarkable success in whitewashing the reputations of his paying Balkan clients, whose pro-Nazi ideological affinities and collaboration with the German occupiers of Yugoslavia during World War II were all quite well known to him. Public awareness of those facts would, of course, have been utterly fatal for their political prospects and the ability of sympathetic Western governments to give them the support which they needed in order to prevail. That is precisely what Harff and his firm were hired to prevent.
“Our challenge was to fix that, and we have done it masterfully,” Harff boasted shamelessly at the time.
Pressed to justify the dissemination of known falsehoods on behalf of his clients in return for mere lucre, Harff excused himself by pointing out that “our job is not to verify information, but to circulate it.”
Techniques of public deception have greatly evolved since then, but largely upon the foundations and following the pattern laid out meticulously during the Yugoslav conflict. At the same time, and not to be downplayed, the geopolitical environment in which these nefarious devices are being practiced has grown immensely more complex and dangerous. The grave charges against President Putin are that he has interfered in the US presidential election, and against President Trump that he may be (in the words of Michael Morell) “an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” The first allegation, if taken seriously, appears to have at least some elements of casus belli. The second suggests a pre-packaged rationale for an operation hitherto unimaginable in the United States – non-institutional regime change. Clearly, the purpose of these accusations is to generate in the United States an atmosphere of public hysteria possibly conducive to a domestic coup, and in international relations to raise tensions to a level approaching – and perhaps at some point including – war with a nuclear-armed superpower.
As in the case of the disintegration of the Former Yugoslavia, these accusations, following Harff’s recommendations to the letter and consisting of a relentless media barrage of “initial statements,” so far have largely been evidence-free. That has resulted in at least one, perhaps fortuitous and unintended, convenience. In the absence of any palpable supporting facts, attempts at refutation are hardly possible and would even make little sense regardless of how ineffectual even the best effort would prove to be, at least according to the authority in these matters, Rudder Finn’s James Harff.
However, this state of affairs would be just professionally tragic for contemporary journalism rather than genuinely concerning for mankind were it not for the fact that a large number of Americans, notoriously deficient as they are in the skills of critical analysis, seem to have fallen for the bait.
According to a recent CNN/ORC poll, 65 percent of the respondents (82 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of Republicans) support the idea of appointing a special prosecutor to “investigate” these issues.
The Russian President’s press spokesman Dmitry Peskov has taken due note of this alarming situation, where large segments of American public opinion, notwithstanding the complete lack of credible prima facie evidence, are being incited to demand official legal action to corroborate by whatever means undocumented accusations against a powerful foreign country and its leader, who seek no quarrel with the US:
“Yes, we do worry,” Peskov said a few days ago. “If you load the public opinion with a huge burden of fake news, of these fake accusations against Russia, if you repeat every day numerous times that Russia is guilty of everything, Russia is interfering, Russia is trying to hack everything in our country and everything that goes wrong in our country is because of Russia, if you keep repeating it… then you will end up having more than 65 percent.”
“So, we consider it a real danger for the future of our bilateral relationship. We sincerely want to see this hysteria coming to its logical end,” Peskov said.
Peskov is spot on about the dangers of such Goebbels-style Propaganda Ministerium manipulation of public perceptions. Russia is not a helpless Balkan country, unable to look after itself, which may endlessly and with impunity be pushed around.
Experienced journalists are becoming increasingly jittery about the reckless disregard for factual evidence and relentless drive for Gleichschaltung which now openly characterize the Western media. Robert Parry notes with great concern that “almost every independent-minded news article that questions the establishment narratives on international affairs is dismissed as ‘Russian propaganda.’ The few politicians, academics and journalists who don’t march in the establishment’s parade are ‘Moscow stooges’ or ‘Putin apologists’.”
To make the matter completely absurd, he adds, “even truthful information is now deemed ‘Russian disinformation’ or Russian-inspired ‘fake news’.”
But to return to the actual charges, Parry continues, “in the case of the Russia-Trump conspiracy theory, the U.S. intelligence community has presented almost no evidence of Russian ‘hacking’ and admits that it has no evidence of Trump’s collusion with the Russians. As far as we know, there is no insider who has described how this alleged conspiracy occurred.”
Echoing Peskov’s grave concern, Parry concludes that “in this current case, however, the downside is not ‘just’ the destruction of people’s careers and a few imprisonments. The downside of playing chicken with nuclear-armed Russia is the end of life as we know it. At such a moment, journalists and politicians should demand the highest standards of proof, not no proof at all.”
There may indeed be some (in the days of the Soviet Union they were termed, somewhat heavy-handedly, the “imperialist ruling circles”) who consider the risk of global destruction a price that is “worth it” (to quote one of their foreign policy mavens from a somewhat different context) if it ensures continued plunder and profit. That is what another astute analyst, Paul Craig Roberts, seems to be suggesting:
“One of the reasons Donald Trump was elected president was his commitment to normalizing relations with Russia and reconsidering the continuation of NATO a quarter century after its purpose ceased to exist with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Trump’s commitment constituted a direct threat to the power and profit of the US military/security complex, whose $1,000 billion annual budget requires a major threat that only Russia can provide.”
Notwithstanding strong suspicions that Roberts’ informed surmises about the corrupt motives behind the current anti-Russia frenzy are basically correct, at some levels of the Deep State an awareness seems to be emerging that the campaign could fall flat if eventually some plausible evidence is not produced. That was keenly noted by Glenn Greenwald in a recent column where he points to some high level preparations that are being made to ensure “deniability,” should no evidence turn up or be successfully concocted, and to enable the Deep State to shift gears should that prove necessary. Interestingly, the same Morell who had earlier accused the President virtually of treason, last week “appeared at an intelligence community forum to ‘cast doubt’ on ‘allegations that members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia’.”
On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians, Greenwood quotes the suddenly circumspect Morell to the effect that “there is smoke, but there is no fire at all…there’s no little campfire, there’s no little candle, there’s no spark. And there’s a lot of people looking for it.”
Still quoting Greenwood, Morell’s astonishingly restrained new perspective was complemented by “the categorical remarks by Obama’s top national security official, James Clapper, who told Meet the Press last week that during the time he was Obama’s DNI, he saw no evidence to support claims of a Trump/Russia conspiracy. ‘We had no evidence of such collusion,’ Clapper stated unequivocally. Unlike Morell, who left his official CIA position in 2013 but remains very integrated into the intelligence community, Clapper was Obama’s DNI until just seven weeks ago, leaving on January 20.”
Add to that the latest official pronouncement on the subject, by Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, that he had seen no evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, and we have one more example of backpedaling.
“What makes all of this most significant,” rightly concludes Glenn Greenwald, “is that officials like Clapper and Morell are trained disinformation agents; Clapper in particular has proven he will lie to advance his interests. Yet even with all the incentive to do so, they are refusing to claim there is evidence of such collusion; in fact, they are expressly urging people to stop thinking it exists. As even the law recognizes, statements that otherwise lack credibility become more believable when they are made ‘against one’s interest’.”
That is all well and good, of course, but in order to arrive at the truth of the matter we should prefer not to depend for enlightenment on the shifting calculations of political deceivers and the tidbits of information tossed to us by factions of the Deep State, even if some of them may occasionally prove to be genuine. In any event, cross-checking information sources is always a good idea.
Our Russian sources have shared with us their view of the hypothetical mechanism by which hacking attacks on Western targets may have been executed in a way deliberately designed to entrap the Russians, while leaving a false trail to suggest that they originated from the Russian Federation. Their hypothesis, roughly speaking, goes thus.
James Harff (Ruder Finn): “Tens of thousands of Jews perished in Croatian camps. So there was every reason for intellectuals and Jewish organizations to be hostile towards the Croats and Bosnians. Our challenge was to reverse this attitude. And we succeded masterfully…”
It is an accepted practice, known to professionals, that private and government servers are from time to time tested employing “legal” hacking attacks which are under full control of the agencies conducting the tests. Certain European “partners,” as it turns out, have insistently invited various Russian IT companies to conclude joint cooperation agreements to participate in such security testing by conducting controlled hacking operations aimed at servers in Germany, France, and other countries. Russian companies were specifically tasked with testing the security safeguards of designated Western entities and their computer networks by conducting technically genuine but actually “friendly” hacking attacks against them. To that end, the Russians say, mutual contracts were signed and payments have been made for services rendered.
While simulating hostile but actually conducting benign and fully supervised hacking attacks, Russian IT firms did not conceal their location while carrying out their end of the bargain because they considered that their activities were taking place by mutual agreement and were therefore perfectly legal. But in the process, enticed under false pretenses, they did leave their traces which may be susceptible of being misconstrued. It turned out, indeed, that the putative Western clients were not at all the actual parties which had ordered the testing of their servers. The designated targets therefore viewed the Russians’ actions not as a controlled experiment for their benefit, undertaken to test their security safeguards, but as a genuine, full-scale hacking operation directed against their systems.
The Russians, we are told, are currently investigating numerous instances of this nature and preliminary results indicate that the trail leads to Great Britain. Russian IT experts are at this point under a strong impression, which further analysis of the evidence may corroborate or refute, that the most likely source of these mysterious “security testing” jobs was MI-6, the British intelligence service.
We wait with bated breath for the further clarification of these fascinating enigmas. In the meantime, gentle reader, you be the judge.
Appendix
Labeling the Serbs as Nazis – The Role of Ruder Finn, a US-Public Relations Firm
Hookers anyone?
The Anglo-Americans have birthed many ugly “cultural industries”, but few match the filth of “public relations”, the coy name of a whole industry dedicated to lying for the benefit of the rich and powerful, including governments. That kids seriously study in “universities” to get a college degree in social prostitution is typical of the times we live in. Moral effluvia passing for respectable professions. The whole machinery of US media is of course deeply and totally integrated into this system.
Source: Theremustbejustice | Posted on December 1, 2012 by B. Ilic
The following is an extract of an interview conducted by Mr. Jacques Merlino (Deputy Director of the network TV2, Paris, France) with James Harff (Director of Ruder Finns’s Global Public affairs section), which took place in October 1993.
Harrf: For 18 months, we have been working for the Republics of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as for the opposition in Kosovo. Throughout this period, we had many successes, giving us a formidable international image. We intend to make advantage of this and develop commercial agreements with these countries. Speed is vital, because items favourable to us must be settled in public opinion. The first statement counts. The retractions have no effect.
Marlino: How often do you intervene?
Harff: Quantity is not important. You have to intervene at the right time with the right person. From June to September, we organized 30 meetings with the main press agencies, as well as meetings between Bosnian officials and Al Gore, Lawrence Eagleburger and 10 influential senators, among them George Mitchell and Robert Dole. We also sent out 13 exclusive news items, 37 last-minute faxes, 17 official letters and eight official reports. We placed 20 telephone calls to White House staff, 20 senators, and close to 100 to journalists, editors, newscaters and other influenctial people in the media.
Question: What achievement were you most proud of?
Harff: To have managed to put Jewish opinion on our side. This was a sensitive matter, as the dossier was dangerous looked from this angle. President Tudjman [of Croatia] was very careless in his book “Wastelands of Historical Reality”. Reading this writtings, one could accuse him of of antisemitism. In Bosnia, the situation was no better: President Izetbegovic strongly supported the creation of a fundamentalist Islamic state [there] in his book “The Islamic Declaration”. Besides, the Croatian and Bosnian past was marked by a real and cruel anti-semitism.
.
Tens of thousands of Jews perished in Croatian camps. So there was every reason for intellectuals and Jewish organizations to be hostile towards the Croats and Bosnians. Our challenge was to reverse this attitude. And we succeded masterfully.
.
At the beginning of August 1992, New York Newsday came out with the affair of [Serb] concentration camps. We jumped at the opportunity immediately. We outwitted three big Jewish organizations – B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish Congress. We suggested to them to publish an advertisement in the “New York Times” and to organize demonstrations outside the United Nations.
.
That was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the game on the side of the [Muslim] Bosnians, we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind. Nobody understood what was happening in Yugoslavia. The great majority of Americans were probably asking themselves in which African country Bosnia was situated. But by a single move we were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys, which would hereafter play itself. We won by targeting Jewish audience.
.
Almost immediately there was a clear change of language in the press, with the use of words with high emotional content, such as “ethnic cleansing”, “concentration camps”, etc., which evoked images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz. The emotional charge was so powerful that nobody could go against it.
.
Marlino: But when you did all of this, you had no proof that what you said was true. You only had the article in “Newsday”!
.
Harff: Our work is not to verify information. We are not equipped for that. Our work is to accelerate the circulation of information favorable to us, to aim at judiciously chosen targets. We did not confirm the existence of death camps in Bosnia, we just made it known that “Newsday” affirmed it.
.
Marlino: Are you aware that you took on a grave responsibility?
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Harff: We are professionals. We had a job to do and we did it. We are not paid to be moral.
.
— James Harff, Director of Ruder Finn, Global Public affairs section, in the Jacques Merlino interview, April 1993. (reprinted in a book in Oct. 1993)
Source: sourcewatch , shofar.de and greens.org
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