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CHAPTER 1

Anti-Russian Hysteria in Propaganda and Fact

In the first part of this chapter, we will look at the new Cold War, reviewing recent accusations about Russia and its president Vladimir Putin as found in the New York Times, the “Newspaper of Record” and the most influential paper in the country. This virtually monolithic attack on Russia and its president by the Times’ leading columnists, feature writers, and editorial board has been part of “one of the biggest fake news operations in U.S. history” according to best-selling author Dan Talbot, “comparable to the yellow journalism promoted by the Hearst papers, which sold military intervention in the Spanish American War.”¹

Re-invoking a historical Russophobia, the Times and media counterparts have consistently warned about a “new Russian imperialism” while casting Putin as a veritable “red devil,” as columnist Maureen Dowd termed him.² Like all effective propaganda, there is a grain of truth to some of the allegations. However, many are unfounded or taken out of context. The U.S. role in provoking some of Putin’s actions is ignored, and inflated metaphors have been used, such as comparisons of the Russian annexation of Crimea to the German blitzkrieg and Anschluss during the Second World War.

The second part of the chapter will challenge the dominant narrative by presenting dissenting views from independent analysts who have placed the contemporary crisis with Russia in proper perspective. Unfortunately, their commentary has been confined to alternative media and hence has not been able to contain the growth of a dangerous “moral panic” that has helped precipitate the outbreak of a new Cold War.

PART I: THE OFFICIAL STORY IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

Owned since 1896 by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, which enjoys close relations with many elements of the U.S. power elite, the New York Times relies on revenues from corporate advertisers and loans from banking firms, neither of which would be pleased if the Times took positions hostile to their interests or that of the corporate community at large. Though nominally liberal in its support for environmental and financial regulation, as well as social issues, the “Newspaper of Record” quite blatantly supports the centrist wing of the Democratic Party. During the 2016 election, even its most liberal columnist, Paul Krugman, frequently ridiculed Bernie Sanders, the progressive dissident. The Times has also supported CIA covert operations and U.S. military power abroad. Its Putin-bashing, defense of NATO, and fomenting of anti-Russian hysteria can thus be placed in the larger context of the paper’s history in “manufacturing consent,” often by playing up the alleged atrocities of official government enemies while whitewashing those of its allies.³

After Putin was elected in March 2000, the Times mixed reservations about his KGB background with reassurance that he “seemed to harbor no nostalgia for the suffocating ideology of communism or the terrors carried out in its name.” It noted that he was “smart and articulate” and appeared to be “a skillful, pragmatic manager” with “some democratic credentials.”⁴ A June 2003 editorial stated that “Putin had done a lot to end the chaos of the Yeltsin years” and bring stability to his country and that he was a “sober, Westernizing leader” who was “prepared to cooperate with the United States and Europe.”⁵

Subsequent editorials encouraged “[President] Bush’s instinct to befriend Mr. Putin” and to “write a positive new chapter in relations with Moscow.” Former national security adviser and Iran-Contra felon Robert “Bud” McFarlane urged cooperation in the War on Terror, suggesting that the United States didn’t have to “choose between Russia and Europe. It [was] in America’s interest to cooperate with both.”⁶

When Putin opposed the Iraq war and U.S.-Russian relations soured, the Times predictably became more hostile. Columnist William Safire, who characterized Russia as “authoritarian at heart and expansionist by habit,” launched the first shot in the anti-Putin movement with his December 10, 2003, editorial, “The Russian Reversion,” which urged resistance against the budding “cult of Putin” and his “one-party rule.”⁷ The Times subsequently denounced Putin’s “old-style KGB tactics” when he arrested oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky before he was to sell a majority of shares of his Yukos oil company to Exxon-Mobil.⁸ Columnist Nicholas Kristof suggested that the West had been “suckered” into believing “Putin was a sober version of Boris Yeltsin,” when he was a “Russified Pinochet or Franco” leading Russia to fascism. According to Kristof, a “fascist Russia was [actually] much better than a communist Russia, since communism was a failed economic system while Franco’s Spain, General Pinochet’s Chile and the others generated solid economic growth, a middle class and international contacts” and “lay the groundwork for democracy.” The United States, nevertheless, needed to take its cue from the Baltic states and Ukrainians and “stand up to Putin” and his “bullying tactics.”⁹

In February 2007, Putin delivered what Times correspondent Steven Lee Myers termed an “acerbic assault on American unilateralism” at the Munich Conference on Security Policy, which roiled feathers in Washington.¹⁰ When Russia subsequently sent troops to defend secessionists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which were invaded by the Georgian government of Mikheil Saakashvili with U.S. military support, Times Foreign Affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote that Putin “deserved a gold medal for brutish stupidity.” Many observers blamed Saakashvili, however, for starting the war, and the Russian intervention (orchestrated actually by President Dmitri Medvedev, whom Friedman called “Putin’s mini-me”) prevented South Ossetia’s absorption into a future NATO member state, restored pride in the Russian army, and prevented threatened ethnic cleansing.¹¹

Anti-Putin Invective Grows in the Obama Years

The anti-Putin invective escalated throughout the Obama years, peaking in Obama’s second term during the Ukraine crisis when the Times supported the U.S.-backed Maidan “revolution” of February 2014 that resulted in the toppling of pro-Russian President Victor Yanukovych.¹² An article by C. J. Chivers and Patrick Reveel alleged Russian intimidation, military occupation, and electoral manipulation ahead of the March 16, 2014, referendum in which 95 percent of Crimeans voted to rejoin Russia. The authors wrote that the referendum had the “trappings of the election-season carnivals that have long accompanied rigged ballots across the old Soviet world.”¹³ These claims ignored that Moscow had thousands of troops in an agreement to protect its naval base at Sevastopol, and that the referendum results stemmed from longstanding ambivalence to Kiev and disdain for the post-coup regime among a majority of Crimeans, especially the many ethnic Russians.¹⁴

In April 2014, the Times published photos of Russian fighters in the Donbass and Luhansk regions that purportedly “proved” the charge of Russian aggression in the civil war that broke out in eastern Ukraine, though the photos were proven to be fakes and the Times had to issue a retraction. The Times editorial board still referred to Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine nevertheless, saying Putin’s actions revealed his “arrogance and contempt for international law,” which justified the levying of sanctions and possibly expelling Russia from the G-8 nations.¹⁵

The Times further violated journalistic standards when it published an unsubstantiated allegation by a conservative Russian oligarch that Putin had been provided advance warning of the pro-Russian Yanukovich government’s collapse, and planned in advance to exploit the ensuing chaos by annexing Crimea with the underlying goal of maintaining the gas supply routes that help Russia dominate European supplies.¹⁶ The Times subsequently helped cover up the massacre of thirty-eight pro-Russian demonstrators in Odessa after right-wing Nazi sympathizers burned the Trade Union House where they were taking refuge after their tent encampment had been ransacked.¹⁷

When Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, Times columnist Roger Cohen mimicked Secretary of State John Kerry in claiming there was “an enormous amount of evidence” pointing to Russian culpability, including “damning audio and images that capture the crime.” Putin has been “playing with fire,” Cohen wrote, as the shooting down of the airplane “amounts to an act of war,” with “193 innocent Dutch souls dishonored by the thugs of the Donetsk People’s Republic.” The only viable response was to help “transform Ukraine’s army into a credible force,” which “won’t happen. Europe is weak [and] Obama’s America is about retrenchment, not resolve. Putin must be appeased.” At the time of these statements, however, no major criminal investigation had been conducted and Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence privy to all the relevant evidence, said there was “no smoking gun.”¹⁸ Cohen’s column was thus pure hyperbole and an incitement for war.

In August 2015, Andrew Higgins and Michael Gordon reported that “Russia had escalated tensions with Ukraine to the highest levels since its stealthy invasion of Crimea in the spring, sending more than 200 trucks from a long-stalled aid convoy into rebel-held eastern Ukraine over the objections of Kiev and, NATO said, conducting military operations on Ukrainian territory.”¹⁹ The latter operations, however, were unverified and the aid convoy was designed to assist local populations devastated from missile and other attacks by Ukrainian government forces. The Times furthermore omitted the United States, European Union (EU), and Canadian role in providing weapons, intelligence support, and training to Ukrainian regiments, which were led in some cases by neo-Nazi militias.²⁰

Times writers Michael D. Shear, Allison Smale, and David Herszenhorn had invoked the Nazi blitzkrieg in referencing Putin’s “invasion” and “lightning annexation” of Crimea, which, they said, “shocked” the NATO countries because it revealed Russia’s “abrupt abandonment of the rules of cooperation and territorial integrity that have governed East-West relations for decades.”²¹

Amy Chozick and Ian Lovett reported uncritically on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s comparisons between Russia’s issuing of passports “to Ukrainians with allegiances to Russia” to what Adolf Hitler did before Germany began invading bordering countries.” Though differentiating Putin from Hitler, the assertion that he had to go into Crimea to protect the Russian minority there was said to be “reminiscent of claims made back in the 1930s” when the Nazis asserted they had to invade Eastern European countries to “protect German minorities.”²² In Crimea, however, Russians are the majority at 65 percent, while Ukrainians and Tatars are the minority. Crimea was historically part of Russia and sacred as the place where Vladimir the Grand Prince of Kiev brought Christianity to Russia and Russian troops heroically fought Britain, France, and Turkey during the nineteenth-century Crimean War.²³

Supporting NATO Expansion

Just as the British press whipped up fear about Russian aggression on the eve of the Crimean War, the “Newspaper of Record” is creating a new Red Scare by echoing U.S. government officials warning about the “re-Sovietization” of Central Asia and Russia’s “resurrection [under Putin] as a global disrupter.”²⁴ Strong offense has been taken at Russia’s “furious” opposition to NATO’s expansion on its borders, despite the fact that Russia had been promised NATO would not expand there. In early 2017, the Times editorial board critiqued President Trump and Defense Secretary James Mattis for calling NATO “obsolete” and suggesting the United States might not support NATO members that have not met their financial obligations at a “time the Western alliance was again facing an assertive and aggressive Russia,” an “especially worrisome” trend “given Mr. Trump’s possible links to Moscow.” In the Times version of history, these are “fraught times for the Western alliance, which even after the Cold War remains a critical unifying bond among the democracies of North America and Europe and whose members have worked together to confront terrorism in Afghanistan and promote stability in several Middle Eastern countries.”²⁵

Russian Interference in the Presidential Election

The official indictment against Putin holds that he ordered an “influence campaign aimed at the U.S. election,” with the goal of “undermining faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrating Hillary Clinton, and harming her electability and potential presidency.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), representing seventeen intelligence agencies, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) determined with “high confidence” that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and leaked documents to WikiLeaks that showed efforts to undermine Bernie Sanders and exposed some of Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street high-rollers. DNI James Clapper testified that “Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 campaign went beyond hacking, and included disinformation and the dissemination of fake news often promoted on social media,” with Putin being said to have “personally directed” the operation.²⁶

Like the good soldiers they are, the Times commentators reported the allegations as fact when conclusive evidence was lacking. Columnist Charles M. Blow asserted that Russian hacking made it “more … clear that … Trump’s victory [is] tainted beyond redemption.” He wrote: “A hostile power stole confidential correspondence from American citizens … and funneled that stolen material to a willing conspirator, Julian Assange [WikiLeaks founder].” Then the hostile foreign action “had its desired result.” Blow later characterized Putin “as the man whose thumb was all over the scale that delivered Trump’s victory,” and likened Trump’s effort to set up a cybersecurity working group with the Russians to “inviting the burglar to help you design your alarm system.”²⁷

Thomas L. Friedman said we did not “take seriously from the very beginning [that] Russia hacked our election. That was a 9/11-scale event. They attacked the core of our democracy. That was a Pearl Harbor scale event.… This goes to the very core of our democracy.”²⁸ For Nicholas Kristof, the truth was absolutely clear: while some foreign leaders want to steal billions of dollars, Putin “may have wanted to steal something even more valuable: an American presidential election.” The fundamental issue is that a “foreign dictatorship [apparently made an effort] to disrupt an American presidential election.” Kristof ended on a small note of caution, however, since the “intelligence community’ is sometimes an oxymoron,” pointing to the alleged Russian “yellow rain” chemical warfare in Southeast Asia decades ago, saying that it may have actually been excrement.²⁹

Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder wrote baselessly in the Times that Putin is a “fascist,” influenced by Ivan Ilyin, “a prophet of Russian fascism.” He has “consciously worked to hollow out the idea of democracy in [his] own country [and] also [seeks] to discredit democracy” in the United States [by meddling in the election].³⁰ Nobel Economics Laureate Paul Krugman agrees, asserting that the “post-election CIA declaration that Russia had intervened on behalf of the Trump campaign was a confirmation, not a revelation (although we’ve now learned that Mr. Putin was personally involved in the effort).” Precisely how Putin was involved, however, he does not say. Krugman reveals his support for Hillary Clinton when he writes that the hacked emails “mostly revealed nothing more than the fact that the Democrats are people,” when in reality they revealed unethical plans to influence the primary outcome, something from which the Russian hacking charge helped divert attention.³¹

“The Kind of Person Sister Mary Ingrid Warned Us About”

According to a June 2017 Pew Research Center poll, 87 percent of Russians have confidence in Putin and think their country has gained stature on the world stage. Some 58 percent of Russians also said they were satisfied with their country’s direction.³² The New York Times, however, has depicted Putin as a threat to global stability and “The New Tsar,” to quote the title of a book by Steven Lee Myers, and by implication an embodiment of the backward traits of Russian society long held in the American imagination.³³

The prize for the most juvenile commentary goes to Gail Collins, who informed Times readers that during the Cold War her Catholic schooling prepared her “to die for our faith in the event of a Communist takeover; things [now] were getting scary again as Putin invaded Ukraine, bombed the hell out of Aleppo [and] tried to interfere with our election. He’s just the kind of person that Sister Mary Ingrid warned us about.”³⁴

This imbecilic chattering and levying of accusations without proof are from a columnist for the most prestigious paper in the country. To put this in historical perspective, one simply needs to recall the propaganda that drenched the media, including the Times, prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 about the evil incarnate Saddam Hussein.³⁵ It’s as if he has been reincarnated in the body of Vladimir Putin. There are no nuances and subtleties, no historical context in the pages of the Times that can help us intelligently explain Putin’s appeal among Russians or how the United States bears considerable responsibility for rising hostilities and can hence play a critical role in defusing them.

Roger Cohen characteristically called Putin a “pure Soviet product [who] traffics in lies,” such as “the supposed Western encirclement of Russia.” It is “inevitable, given what he represents, that Trump looks to Putin.” Paul Krugman reminds readers that Putin is “an ex-KGB man—which is to say, he spent his formative years as a professional thug.” In another column, he writes that Russia has very little to offer anyone except those rightists who find “macho posturing and ruthlessness attractive.”³⁶ Krugman treats Barack Obama respectfully by contrast, even though Obama ordered the deaths of thousands in the drone war.

Michael McFaul, ambassador to Russia under Obama, blames Putin for increased U.S.-Russian tension, writing that “this new era crept up on us, because we did not fully win the Cold War.… But the collapse of the Soviet order did not lead smoothly to a transition to democracy and markets inside Russia”—a telling juxtaposition clearly not intended. An autocrat at heart, Putin “needed an enemy—the United States—to strengthen his legitimacy.” His “propagandists rolled out clips on American imperialism, immoral practices and alleged plans to overthrow the Putin government,” with the “shrill anti-Americanism reaching fever pitch” during the annexation of Crimea. Putin “embraces confrontation with the West, [and] no longer feels constrained by international laws and norms.” Just like the Cold War, an “ideological struggle between autocracy and democracy has returned to Europe,” and democracies “need to recognize … Putin’s rule for what it is—autocracy [with which] there can be no compromise.”³⁷

Failing to give adequate context for Putin’s rise, McFaul sounds like George Kennan in differentiating the supposedly progressive, democratic West from the backward, autocratic, and expansionist Russia, whose strongman only understands the language of force. According to Swiss journalist Guy Mettan, Russophobic discourse has its roots in the Middle Ages when Charlemagne competed with Byzantium for the title of heir to the Roman Empire, and anti-Orthodox Catholic propaganda followed the schism between the West and East of which Russia was associated. Russophobia, Mettan says, resembles both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in that it “exists first in the head of the one who looks not in the victims’ alleged behavior or characteristics. [It is] a way of turning specific pseudo-facts into essential one-dimensional values, barbarity, despotism and expansionism in the Russian case in order to justify stigmatization and ostracism.”³⁸

What popular demonology leaves out is that many of Russia’s problems are structural and linked to the predatory actions of Western financial interests in the 1990s, and that Mr. Putin has a base of popular support because he has revived Russian self-respect and power from the Yeltsin era. In his time in office, Putin has ordered the oligarchs to pay taxes and jailed or exiled some, regained national control over oil and gas deposits sold to ExxonMobil and other Western oil companies under Yeltsin, and asserted control over the Russian Central Bank. Putin has further prevented Russia’s disintegration while implementing policies that improved infrastructure, living standards, and led to a decrease in corruption and crime, something the Times has admitted. Inflation, joblessness, and poverty rates have declined while wages have improved. Putin has overcome Western sanctions by improving trade relations with China and other “BRIC” nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and advanced his vision of a Eurasian Union uniting Kazakhstan and Belarus in a regional trading bloc.³⁹

The Times and other media outlets promote a double standard in singling out Putin for his authoritarian style when the United States supports murderous tyrants around the world like the Saudi royal family and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, and authoritarian leaders in the former Soviet republics whose abuses are rarely highlighted or exposed. Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, was characterized as “the father of Russian democracy” and compared to Abraham Lincoln when he used tank cannons to storm the parliament following a constitutional crisis he precipitated, resulting in around five hundred deaths, killed thousands in invading Chechnya, and imposed disastrous “shock therapy” economic policies pushed by American advisers—dubbed “the Harvard Boys”—that resulted in an unprecedented rise in the mortality rate. Yeltsin also allied with oligarchs who essentially bought him the presidency in 1996.⁴⁰

Paul Craig Roberts, assistant secretary of the treasury under President Ronald Reagan, points out that “the initial collapse of the USSR worked very much to the West’s advantage. The [United States and its allies] could easily manipulate Yeltsin, and various oligarchs were able to seize and plunder the resources of the country. Much … American money was part of that. When Putin came along and started stopping this and trying to put the country back in place, he was demonized.”⁴¹

There is a gap in quality between at least some of the Times reporting and the opinion pieces. In April 2016, for example, the Times ran an informative article by William J. Broad and David E. Sanger discussing the race for the latest class of nuclear weaponry between Russia, China, and the United States. They pointed out that while American officials have largely blamed escalating tensions on Putin and the Chinese for their apparent aggressive drives in the South China Sea, these two “adversaries look at what the United States expects to spend on nuclear revitalization—estimated up to a trillion over three decades—and use it to lobby for their own sophisticated weaponry.”

The article went on to point out that President Obama himself had recognized that his nuclear weapons modernization program could undermine his own previous record of progress on arms control.⁴² From this example we see that Times journalists are capable of first-rate analysis. However, in our assessment, instances of quality reporting have been overshadowed by the barrage of pieces painting Putin and Russia in the darkest of hues, which contribute in turn to the popular impression that the Russians are coming, again.

PART II: FURTHERING OUR CRITIQUE

In a December 2016 interview with David Barsamian on Alternative Radio, a weekly public affairs program that provides analyses and views that are often ignored or distorted in the corporate media, Stephen Cohen, the noted scholar on the Soviet Union and Russia, reminded listeners that the Russian people have a long memory of the staggering loss of human life and physical destruction brought on by the Nazi invasion during the Second World War. Their celebration of V-E Day (Victory in Europe) on May 9 is their “most sacred secular holiday.” Vivid memories of the war “awakened … ferocious reactions in Russia” over what was unfolding in Ukraine. “When you get guys who look and smell like neo-Nazis running around burning up people, as they did in Odessa in 2014, it awakens memories of World War Two and the Nazi occupation.” It was greater because the United States helped bring about the coup in Ukraine, the result of years of U.S. intervention there, aided by the Soros Foundation and the National Endowment on Democracy (NED), which worked to undermine the existing regime. Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of state under Hillary Clinton, admitted before Congress that the United States spent $5 billion “building democracy” there before the crisis. What does it mean to “build democracy”? It is “to create a country aligned with us, because there’s probably less democracy in Ukraine today … than there was when they overthrew” the former president Victor Yanukovych, in February 2014.

Cohen says it is a misnomer to claim that Putin invaded Ukraine when what he did was “react” to a Western encroachment that was part of a “long-term effort to bring Ukraine into NATO. The documents are there to be read.” Putin was given intelligence information stating that there “was going to be a march on the Russian historical and strategic naval base on the Crimean peninsula” and this possibility presented “a grave danger.… We could argue that he overreacted; you can make a case. But he was reacting.” After the United States helped “to overthrow the government there or abetted the overthrow of a legally elected leader—and it was recognized that the Ukrainian election of Yanukovych had been fair—and bringing an unelected regime to power,” why wouldn’t Russia react? “Taking Ukraine over, recognizing the new government immediately, bringing these guys to Washington, with McCain and the others in the streets egging them on, did we think Russia wouldn’t react? Why is that Russian aggression?”⁴³

Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, who supported the Maidan protests and produced a film investigating the death of Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko, concurs with Cohen’s assessment, pointing out that Putin is not a threat to world security any more than the United States, which is much more powerful. Nekrosov further stated in an interview that “there is simply no evidence of Putin’s excessive riches [as the media has reported]; not even a single evidence of some bank accounts, or a bribe he or his wife for example got from an industry or such thing [whereas] there was such evidence in Yeltsin’s case, quite specific and direct.” Though not personally enamored of Putin, Nekrosov says that he gets “elected and is hugely popular in Russia and doesn’t need to suppress democracy very much, even if he were able to.… The media apart from the big national TV channels is relatively free.”⁴⁴

Robert Parry of Consortium News suggests that the broad demonization of Putin has set the groundwork for a potential “regime change” and program of isolation designed to punish Putin for blocking American machinations in Syria and Iran and to ensure control over the Eurasian heartland. The first phase of this plan was the Ukraine coup where Victoria Nuland “was caught on an unsecure phone line telling U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt” how they “would ‘midwife’ a change in government that would put Nuland’s choice … in power.” Parry has raised doubt about Russia’s culpability in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, based on the fact that the State Department refuses to make public radar information that Secretary of State Kerry said points to the location of the offending missile. Parry spoke to an intelligence agent who indicated that as U.S. “analysts gained more insights from technical and other sources, they came to believe the attack was carried out by a rogue element of the Ukrainian military” with ties to hardline oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who may have been intending to bring down Putin’s plane which was flying nearby.⁴⁵

In September 2016, a Dutch-led investigation provided evidence suggesting that the missile used in the shoot-down was fired from a field controlled by pro-Russian fighters in Ukraine and was brought in from Russian territory. The investigation relied heavily on Ukrainian intelligence sources with a vested interest in blaming Russia, however, and failed to mention that the Ukrainian military controlled all anti-aircraft missile batteries in eastern Ukraine. It also did not have access to U.S. radar data and said it was still trying to establish who the perpetrators were.⁴⁶ The truth thus remains elusive.

Like the British and French press did in the nineteenth century, the New York Times alleges without substantiation that Russia financed political parties throughout Western Europe in an effort to infiltrate and destabilize the region. Putin also reportedly killed many of his rivals, pilfered millions in state funds and armed the Taliban, though the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency told the Senate he had “not seen any physical evidence.”⁴⁷ Putin was further accused of covering up Syrian chemical attacks, though it now appears it was not the source of these attacks. The Syrians struck a weapons cache that released toxic clouds of fertilizers that were magnified by dense morning air, as veteran journalist Seymour Hersh reported in a story published only by a German newspaper.⁴⁸

According to Edward S. Herman, the Times from January 1 to March 21, 2014, had twenty-three articles on the Pussy Riot group to signify alleged Russian limits on free speech, and gave one member of the group op-ed space to denounce Putin. The group had been arrested after disrupting a church service and were given a two-year sentence. Around the same time, eighty-four-year-old Sister Megan Rice was given a four-year jail sentence for protesting a nuclear weapons site in Tennessee, but she was mentioned only in the back pages and not given an opportunity to publish an op-ed. Nor could she meet with the Times editorial board as Pussy Riot did. Another double-standard was the great indignation at Assad-Putin inhumanity in Aleppo compared to the relative silence about rebel atrocities in Syria and civilian casualties in Fallujah and Mosul under U.S.-allied attacks, which were significant.⁴⁹

The Times meanwhile refused to characterize the Maidan protests that resulted in the overthrow of Yanukovych as a coup when even Maidan protestors in Kiev characterized it as such since they could not pass a referendum for impeachment. The Times in turn sugarcoated the new regime led by Petro Poroshenko, who was described in a WikiLeaks cable from the American embassy as a “disgraced oligarch … tainted by credible corruption allegations,” and appointed as deputy prime minister a member of the far-right Svoboda Party who told the EU parliament that a “fascist dictatorship is the best way to rule a country.”⁵⁰

The Times further failed to report on the CIA and George Soros Foundation’s role in financing the Maidan protests, and on the humanitarian crisis that resulted from brutal “anti-terrorist” operations directed by Kiev against pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Donbass region who were falsely labeled “pawns of Putin” (the region is, in fact, Russian-speaking and has strong interests in remaining tied to Russia). Warning about the plight of over a million displaced children whose schools had been destroyed, UNICEF referred to “an invisible emergency which most of the world has forgotten.” This was thanks largely to the blackout in the Times and other media that also ignored the machinations of the Biden wing of the Obama administration in undermining efforts by John Kerry to promote the Minsk peace agreements, possibly because of Biden’s son Hunter’s business interests in the Ukraine. Hunter was named to the board of a Ukrainian Natural Gas company in April 2014—just three months after the coup.⁵¹

Lessons Not Learned

The similarities between the blitz in 2002–2003 for war against Iraq and for action against Russia and Putin are striking. Many readers will recall how the CIA under George W. Bush leaked phony intelligence to Michael Gordon and Judith Miller of the Times, claiming that Iraq was procuring aluminum tubes to enrich uranium for its nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (WMD). James Carden, a former adviser to the U.S.-Russia Presidential Commission at the State Department, pointed out in 2017 that something eerily similar was taking place regarding Russia, in which “assurances from the intelligence community and from anonymous Obama administration ‘senior officials’ about the existence of evidence [regarding alleged election hacking] is being treated as … actual evidence.”⁵²

As a sign of continuity, Michael Gordon, a chief culprit in “helping to scam the USA into occupation and invasion of Iraq,” is among those who have reported disinformation about Ukraine. Fellow Iraq War cheerleaders have been among the loudest to demonize Putin. Charles Krauthammer told Fox News: “Of course it all [DNC hacks] came from the Russians, I’m sure it’s all there in the intel.” David Frum in The Atlantic stated that Trump “owes his office in considerable part to illegal clandestine activities in his favor conducted by a hostile, foreign spy service.” Jacob Weisberg agrees, tweeting: “Russian covert action threw the election to Donald Trump. It’s that simple.” This is the same Weisberg who wrote back in 2008, “The first thing I hope I’ve learned from this experience of being wrong about Iraq is to be less trusting of expert opinion and received wisdom.”⁵³ Lesson not learned.

Placing the Election Hysteria in Context

When U.S. intelligence agencies finally released a declassified version of its report on the election, the New York Times and the Washington Post quoted from it verbatim, supporting the conclusion that Putin and Russia were behind the DNC hacks. Close reading of the report, however, shows that it barely supports such a conclusion. Devoting considerable attention to the Russia Today (RT) news network, which was impugned for offering critical analysis of U.S. politics, the report merely provided an “assessment,” which journalist Robert Parry notes is an “admission” that the classified information was “less than conclusive because, in intelligence-world-speak” to “assess” actually means “to guess.”⁵⁴

Historian Gareth Porter writes that the intelligence community never obtained evidence to prove Russia was behind WikiLeaks’ publication of the DNC emails, “much less that it had done so with the intention of electing Trump.” After the U.S. election, DNI James Clapper testified twice before Congress that “the intelligence community did not know who had provided the emails to WikiLeaks and when they were provided.” The NSA further considered the idea that the Kremlin was working to elect Trump as merely plausible, not actually supported by reliable evidence.⁵⁵

Half of Clinton voters nevertheless believe that Russia not only leaked emails but tampered with vote tallies. A more plausible scenario is that either Clinton blamed Russia to try to save her campaign, or that CIA director John Brennan, appointed by President Obama, initiated the election-hacking scandal and Russia-Gate investigations in order to preserve a belligerent policy toward Russia to which the CIA and other national security organizations were committed. Brennan issued a public warning to Trump about his Russian policy on Fox News. “I think Mr. Trump has to understand that absolving Russia of various actions that it’s taken in the past number of years is a road that he, I think, needs to be very, very careful about moving down.”⁵⁶

In December 2016, twenty intelligence, military, and diplomatic veterans who had formed Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) sent an open letter to President Obama calling on him to release the evidence that proves Russia aided the Trump campaign—or to admit that it does not exist. They wrote that the alleged Russian interference in the election has been called “an act of war” and Mr. Trump a “traitor”; the “intelligence,” however, to support these assertions, “does not pass the smell test.” Obama never responded.

The VIPS wrote that media attacks against Trump and Putin were lacking journalistic standards as top intelligence officials “published what we found to be an embarrassingly shoddy report purporting to prove Russian hacking in support of Trump’s candidacy,” and a Times banner headline said: “PUTIN LED SCHEME TO AID TRUMP, REPORT SAYS.” The paper claimed that the revelations in “this damning report … undermined the legitimacy” of the President-Elect, and “made the case that Mr. Trump was the favored candidate of Mr. Putin,” but a back-page article in the same issue stated: “What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack.… [There was] no discussion of the forensics used to recognize the handiwork of known hacking groups, no mention of intercepted communications between the Kremlin and the hackers, no hint of spies reporting from inside Moscow’s propaganda machinery.”⁵⁷

For VIPS, the key question was how the material from “Russian hacking” got to WikiLeaks, because WikiLeaks published the DNC and Podesta emails (John Podesta was chairman of Hillary Clinton’s election campaign). William Binney, former technical director of the NSA, pointed out it “would almost certainly have yielded a record of any electronic transfer from Russia to WikiLeaks.” If Obama could not make public any evidence, he probably did not have any.⁵⁸

A forensics study undertaken by a retired IBM program manager, Skip Folden, found that DNC data were copied onto a storage device at a speed that exceeds the Internet capability for a remote hack. The operation was performed on the East Coast of the United States, suggesting an inside leak, which was later doctored to incriminate Russia. Folden’s study was ignored by the Times and other media, along with the curious fact that the FBI never sought access to the DNC computers as part of its investigation or bothered to interview a British diplomat who claims to have met the leaker outside Washington.⁵⁹ Months after the fact, when the government’s own investigation stalled, the Times kept publishing sensational front-page exposés purporting to unearth secret hackers in Ukraine, and a diabolical plot by Russia to set up fake social media accounts to spread stories critical of Clinton and U.S. foreign policy, which the Times baselessly claimed helped sway the election.⁶⁰

Russia-Gate in Context: Trump and His Pro-Kremlin Cabinet

Times writers have routinely lambasted Donald Trump for his alleged “slavish devotion to the Russian strongman” as Max Boot put it in an op-ed calling for a get-tough policy, and cast him as beholden to Russian interests. Paul Krugman on July 22, 2016, predicted that “Mr. Trump would, in office, follow a pro-Putin foreign policy, at the expense of America’s allies and her own self-interest.” Maureen Dowd later advised Trump to “stop fawning over his new BFF [Best Friend Forever] whose eyes flash KGB” and to stop “adopting a blame America First attitude when it comes to the Russians.”⁶¹

Following on the heels of the Senate Russia-Gate investigations, the Times published numerous articles trying to show collusion between Trump advisers and Russia, insinuating some had committed treason.⁶² However, thus far the only proof is that they had financial dealings in Russia or communications with Russian officials they failed to disclose, or expressed some interest in obtaining political dirt on Clinton from people with vague ties to the Kremlin. There is no evidence they, or Trump, colluded with the Russians, as a number of key figures including former CIA directors have acknowledged.⁶³

Even Michael Flynn, who was forced to resign his position after intelligence officials leaked that he had discussed Obama’s last round of sanctions with the Russian ambassador before he took office, appears to have simply said, when the Russian ambassador brought it up, that the sanctions would be reviewed upon taking office. This statement by Flynn violated the 1799 Logan Act prohibiting individuals outside the administration from influencing foreign governments in disputes by the United States. However, critical commentators have pointed out that if this is a crime, there are far worse precedents, including Obama’s top Russian adviser Michael McFaul visiting Moscow on the campaign trail in 2008 for talks, and treason committed by Richard Nixon when he sabotaged the Vietnamese peace talks to secure his election in 1968. The underlying agenda behind the Russia-Gate is apparent in that Flynn’s replacement, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, has a strongly hawkish view on Russia, suggesting Russia-Gate was succeeding in pushing Trump away from his one sensible campaign pledge for détente.⁶⁴

A Broken Promise: NATO Expansion and the New Cold War

American policymakers were deceitful at the end of the Cold War as they privately made plans for U.S. and NATO dominance in Eastern Europe while promising Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev and foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze that if they agreed to German reunification and Germany’s becoming a member of NATO, the latter would not “expand one inch to the east.” When Russian political analyst Alex Duggan asked Zbigniew Brzezinski how the West managed to persuade Gorbachev to withdraw Russia’s troops from East Germany, Brzezinski smiled and said, “We tricked him.”⁶⁵

Gorbachev had proposed a pan-European security agreement and raised the idea of having the Soviet Union join NATO, which then Secretary of State James Baker refused, leaving Russia on the periphery of post–Cold War Europe. According to historian Marie Elise Sarotte, a “young KGB officer serving in East Germany in 1989 offered his own recollection of that era in an interview a decade later in which he remembered returning to Moscow full of bitterness at how ‘the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe.’ His name was Vladimir Putin and he would one day have the power to act on that bitterness.”⁶⁶

In 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were admitted to NATO amid Russian opposition, followed over the next decade by seven Central and Eastern European countries including Georgia and Estonia, which is just sixty miles from St. Petersburg. Stephen Cohen points out that the use of NATO for offensive military purposes following the end of the Cold War represented a “radical departure from its original defensive mission, particularly in Russia’s traditional backyard.” Coming on the heels of the first NATO expansion, the U.S.-led bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 inflicted “‘a deep psychological wound’ on Russian political life.” The U.S.-NATO war against Russia’s fellow Slav nation “played a major role in bringing the country’s security forces back to the center of the political stage.… It even aroused the fear that Russia itself might be NATO’s next victim—‘Yugoslavia yesterday, Russia tomorrow.’” Since Russia could not “match the U.S. conventional air weapons it had observed over Serbia,” the Kremlin fell back on a frightening conclusion: “There remained nothing else but to rely on nuclear weaponry.”

In the face of misleading media coverage, Cohen pleads with citizens to “imagine how this encroachment … is seen from Moscow. Coupled with NATO’s movement toward the country’s western borders, it has revived the specter of a ‘hostile encirclement of Russia.’ Among the worst legacies of Stalinism, that fear played a lamentable Cold War and repressive role in Soviet Russian politics for four decades.”⁶⁷

Heading a state that has collapsed twice within eighty years, Putin’s main focus has always been to ensure that the Russian state endures; not so it can conquer the world but so it can protect its people. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, GDP in Russia plunged by forty percent, people lost their social benefits, 75 percent were plunged into poverty, longevity for men dropped to about fifty-seven years and disease epidemics revived. The 1990s was a horrible decade, though the New York Times extolled Boris Yeltsin as a “key defender of Russia’s hard-won democratic reforms” and “enormous asset for the U.S.”⁶⁸

In a rekindled Cold War atmosphere, those who try to explain Putin’s motives today are subjected to neo-McCarthyite attacks, branded as Putin apologists, or worse. To sustain respectability, even progressive commentators go out of their way to demonize the Russian leader. Matt Taibbi, for example, called Putin a “gangster-spook-scum of the lowest order … capable of anything” in a Rolling Stone article critical of Russia-Gate.⁶⁹

The net effect of all the media coverage is to entrench the belief that Putin is an aggressor and menace to the United States like Stalin during the Cold War. Critical scrutiny into U.S. conduct is ignored and the bipartisan consensus remains one of promoting confrontation. The House Republican most critical of the Magnitsky Act promoting economic sanctions tellingly called for investigation into Hillary Clinton’s involvement with Russian financiers who donated heavily to the Clinton Foundation, and an alleged clandestine Russian campaign, backed by U.S. environmental groups, aimed at undermining the American fracking industry and construction of oil and gas pipelines.⁷⁰ Russophobia and the scapegoating of Russia, we can see, is a political tactic adopted on both sides of the aisle.

An ominous manifestation of the new Cold War is the growing competition to control the Arctic, where the thaw facilitated by climate change has facilitated access to raw materials. The U.S. Navy has announced plans to expand its presence and deployed its submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) third of the U.S. nuclear triad there. This is another provocative act from the Russian viewpoint that counteracts the New York Times Manichaean view of world affairs in which Russia is always the aggressor.⁷¹

For over a decade, the “Newspaper of Record” has been competing with other major media outlets to place Putin on the same stage as Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-Un, Bashir al-Assad, Muammar Qaddafi, and other “rogue state” leaders. These efforts have clearly succeeded; in 2015, polls showed that only 13 percent of citizens here had a favorable opinion of Mr. Putin, and 24 percent a favorable opinion about Russia, an all-time low. A 2017 poll found that 42 percent viewed Russia as a critical threat, up from 23 percent in 2002, while 53 percent think the United States should work to limit Russia’s international influence rather than cooperate. Fifty-two percent would support using U.S. troops to defend a Baltic NATO member if attacked. In a stark reflection of the partisan divide, 61 percent of Democrats view Russia as a major threat compared to only 36 percent of Republicans.⁷² These figures, worse even than the Cold War years, exemplify the success of the elite media-orchestrated demonization campaign and allegations of election-meddling, and bode ominously for the prospect of future cooperation and peace.