More Clapp-trap: Senate Hearing on Russian Election Mischief Again Fails to Prove Anything

By Dave Lindorff

            The Russian hacking hysteria in the US media and, surprisingly, among educated liberals (who should know better after years of government lies and deceit, particularly about foreign affairs), is becoming increasingly embarrassing.

            Over and over we have been told that the government, whether in the form of the departing President Obama or unidentified “intelligence sources” cited in news reports, or statements by private security contractors with their vested interest in trying to show how vulnerable America’s (and the Democratic Party’s!) servers are, that they have solid evidence that the Russians hacked DNC emails and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails, only for it to turn out to be more of the same innuendos, circumstantial “evidence,” suspicions, and inevitably ridiculous and embarrassing errors (like the Washington Post’s breathless and false story that the Russians had hacked the Vermont power grid and could shut off the heat during a cold snap).

            The latest example is yesterday’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, which featured the Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., who is the boss of the CIA, the NSA and the rest of the whole vast US intelligence apparatus. Clapper told the committee that he stands “more resolutely” than ever behind the CIA’s initial assessment of Oct. 7 that Russian leaders at the “senior-most levels” had orchestrated a campaign of interference in the presidential election.

            Clapper testified ominously about  a vast campaign of interference which he claimed involved everything from hacking the DNC to spreading disinformation and what he called “fake news.”  He said, “Whatever crack, fissure, they could find in our tapestry...they would exploit.”  Why, he said in outrage, their state-owned English-language television station RT-TV (available in about 15% of American home cable packages) even “disparaged our system, our alleged hypocrisy about human rights.”

            Gee, how evil can an empire be?

            Seriously, if an American citizen is ignorant enough not to at least be skeptical about a report about American politics that is being aired by a news organization called Russia TV, we’re in serious trouble. But I guess that’s another issue for another day.

            Meanwhile, is it really that unreasonable that a Russian news organization (or a Chinese news organization, or even a German one for that matter) might air a report about American hypocrisy on human rights, when ours is a country, after all, that routinely criticizes other countries for such violations while at the same time is itself still holding people without charge in a prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba 14 years after they were captured and rendered to that hell-hole, that boasts the largest prison population in the world, both in absolute numbers and as a percent of population, that as a matter of policy holds some 25,000 of its 2 million incarcerated prisoners in long-term solitary confinement...

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively-run, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3414