By Scott Ritter
May 04, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - - "RT"
- The Director of National Intelligence
has ostensibly created a new “center” for the
sharing and analysis of information and intelligence
about foreign interference in US elections. Its real
focus is much more nefarious.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence
(ODNI) announced in a statement on Monday that it
was creating
a new intelligence “center” focused on tracking
so-called “foreign malign influence,” reported
Politico. This new entity, known as the Foreign
Malign Influence Center, was mandated in the recent
intelligence and defense budget authorization acts,
representing the reality that the impetus for its
creation came from Congress, and not the
intelligence community.
For example, the most recent defense
expenditure authorization required that the ODNI
establish a “social media data analysis center” to
coordinate and track foreign social media influence
operations by analyzing data voluntarily shared by
US social media companies. Based upon this analysis,
the ODNI would report to Congress on a quarterly
basis on trends in foreign influence and
disinformation operations to the public. As
envisioned by Congress, the intelligence community
would determine jointly with US social media
companies which data and metadata will be made
available for analysis.
In short, the intelligence community, using data
obtained from the social media accounts of American
citizens, will report to Congress how this data
influences the political decision making of these
same American citizens.
If this does not make the most ardent defender of
the US Constitution ill, nothing will.
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It is not as if the US intelligence community
wasn’t trending in this direction on its own
volition. The straw that broke the camel’s back, so
to speak, was the publication in March 2021 of an intelligence
community assessment entitled ‘Foreign Threats
to the US 2020 Presidential Election’. In this
document, the US intelligence community assessed
that “Russian President Putin authorized, and a
range of Russian government organizations conducted,
influence operations aimed at denigrating President
Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party,
supporting former President Trump, undermining
public confidence in the electoral process, and
exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US.”
But the most damning portion of this assessment came
when it delved into the specific methodology
employed by Russia to achieve these nefarious aims.
“Throughout the election cycle”, the assessment
declared, “Russia’s online influence actors sought
to affect US public perceptions of the candidates,
as well as advance Moscow’s long standing goals of
undermining confidence in US election processes and
increasing sociopolitical divisions among the
American people. During the presidential primaries
and dating back to 2019, these actors backed
candidates from both major US political parties that
Moscow viewed as outsiders, while later claiming
that election fraud helped what they called
‘establishment’ candidates. Throughout the election,
Russia’s online influence actors sought to amplify
mistrust in the electoral process by denigrating
mail-in ballots, highlighting alleged
irregularities, and accusing the Democratic Party of
voter fraud.”
As an American citizen who is politically engaged, I
read the intelligence community assessment with a
combination of interest, concern, and outrage. The
notion of “Russian online influence actors”
affecting “US public perceptions of the candidates”
is as intellectually vacuous as it is factually
unsustainable. The stupidity encapsulated by such
analysis can only be excused by the fact that the
intelligence community assessment is a document
produced more for the benefit of domestic political
consumption than a genuine effort at identifying and
quantifying legitimate threats to the US.
The assessment itself is short on hard data.
However, the
House Intelligence Committee has documented some
3,000 social media ads bought by Russian “troll
farms” between 2015-2017, at a cost of some
$100,000. These ads were in addition to so-called
“organic posts,” some 80,000 of which were published
on US social media, free of charge, by alleged
Russian “bots” resulting in 126 million “views” by
Americans. These ads were crude, unfocused, and
simply inane in terms of their content.
To put the alleged Russian influence campaign into
perspective, one need only reflect on the fact that
during his short bid for the Democratic nomination, Michael
Bloomberg spent nearly $1 billion underwriting
the single most sophisticated public relations
campaign, including hundreds of millions of targeted
social media ads put together by the most brilliant
political minds money could buy. All this money,
time and effort, however, could not change the
reality that, to the American public, Michael
Bloomberg was an unattractive candidate – in the
end his $1 billion bought him exactly two delegates.
The fact is, the political opinions of most American
citizens are formed based upon a lifetime of
exposure to issues that matter for them the most,
whether it be education, right-to-life, gun control,
social justice, agriculture, energy, environment,
law enforcement, or any other of the multitude of
sources of causation that impact the day-to-day
existence of the American electorate.
Some of these beliefs are inherited, such as the
working-class attachment to unions. Some are driven
by current affairs, such as the growing awareness of
climate change. But all are derived from the life
experience of each American, and the thought that
these deeply held beliefs could be bought, changed,
or otherwise manipulated by social media posts
published by foreign actors, malign or otherwise, is
deeply insulting to me, and should be to every other
American as well.
The irony is that by creating an intelligence
organization whose task it is to help prevent the
political Balkanization of America by analyzing the
social media accounts of Americans who hold
differing political beliefs than “the establishment”
the newly minted Foreign Malign Influence Center
ostensibly serves, the resulting process will only
cause the further political division of the United
States.
Some 74 million Americans voted for a candidate,
Donald Trump, who has promulgated the very issues
that the Democratic-controlled Congress seeks to
denigrate and suppress through the work of this new
intelligence center. These ideas will not simply
disappear because the Democrats in Congress have
empowered a “center” within the intelligence
community whose sole function is to demonize any
political thought that does not conform with the
powers that be.
As it is currently focused, the Foreign Malign
Influence Center is the living, breathing embodiment
of politicized intelligence, two words which, when
put together, represent the death knell for any
intelligence organization. Worse, the work it will
be doing, when turned over to a Democratically
controlled Congress desperate to undermine the
political viability of those 74 million American
citizens, will only further fracture an already
divided nation.
The Foreign Malign Influence Center was specifically
mandated to examine the social media influence
campaigns operated by Russia, China, Iran, and North
Korea. It is particularly telling that they were not
directed to investigate the two largest foreign
sources of political influence in America today,
namely the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee
and the Murdoch media empire. President Putin could
only dream about being able to buy congressional
seats the way AIPAC does, or control what
information becomes magnified (and, by extension,
suppressed) by the newspapers, television and radio
enterprises owned by Rupert Murdoch.
These are the true villains when it comes to foreign
corruption of American politics. These foreigners,
however, have a seat at the establishment table.
Their malign influence will never be labeled as
such, and they will never have to withstand the
ignominy of having their work scrutinized under the
politicized microscope of an intelligence community
that has allowed itself to be corrupted by domestic
American politics to the point that it no longer
serves the American people as a whole, but only a
select class of American persons.
Scott Ritter is a former US
Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of 'SCORPION
KING: America's
Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to
Trump.' He served in the Soviet Union as an
inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General
Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from
1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on
Twitter @RealScottRitter
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