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As with many others there are a number of things I feel I got wrong in 2002/2003. The big one was going from being a staunch opponent of military action agst Iraq to thinking we shld threaten war to get inspectors back into the country. Once the threat of war did just that I ...
2/ made crystal clear that we shouldn’t invade. And through 2002 I spent loads of time cataloguing all of the administrations lies about WMD and the deceptions about democratization. Of course once the inspectors were back in we invaded anyway. Because for the White House ...
3/ that had all been a pretext. They wanted to invade regardless. The big thing I learned from this was the folly of holding to a position that might be sensible in the abstract but had nothing to do with the reality of the moment which was a White House that simply wanted ...
4/ to go to war and was using ten different arguments to get to that end. This is a lesson that is highly relevant today. Notional arguments which may have a logic in the abstract aren’t good arguments if they give cover to bad faith actors who have power in the moment.
5/ In any case, here’s the article I wrote in March 2003 about the Bush/neocon “democratization” claims. washingtonmonthly.com/2003/03/01/pra…
6/ This actually comes back in a funny way to the origins of the Russia story. I’ve always been hostile to Russia hawkery in the US. When the Post first reported claims that Russia was behind the hacking of the DNC I was skeptical, at least in part because it was a ...
7/ private sector consultancy who seemed to be the main source of the claims - companies who in the nature of things like getting publicity to promote their services. So we assigned a reporter to look into it, talk to competitors and none consultant security experts ...
8/ about whether these claims actually held up or whether they were just smoke. We expected a story abt the cyber security industrial complex pushing ambiguous evidence to rustle up business.
9/ What we got didn’t fit that. It turned out the non-consultant types were fairly convinced it was Russia. The evidence at the time was still amorphous. So it wasn’t that they were all sure. But they were telling us stuff that didn’t fit our initial assumption.
10/ They thought crowdstrike, the security company, was likely right. The story, I think, never ended up getting published because it wasn’t clear that we had a story one way or another. But it did make me think there was more to the Russian hacking claims than I’d suspected.
11/ I also became suspicious of the assumption that the hacking was for surveillance rather than for some offensive capacity. And this got me on kick of looking more seriously at some threads I’d seen about Trumps business ties to Russia and the fact that Manafort ...
12/ had worked in that part of the world for years. What I came up with surprised me. I put it all together in this piece. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-p…
13/ This piece was actually published I think the day after the first Wikileaks email release. But I’d been working on it for several days prior. I didn’t add in the emails stuff before publishing because claims about Russia being behind it seemed far too speculative to me.
14/ And I didn’t want to distract attention from the stuff I was focusing on, which was that Trump clearly had deep business ties to Russian and Ukraine money and that his campaign was filled with people who had close ties to Russia. Until this point I’d seen his comments ....
15/ abt Putin as just a subset of all the other bonkers things Trump said and says. Now it seemed clear to me it was more than that, though just what it was wasn’t clear to me. There are obviously minimal and maximal versions of what is in that black box.
16/ My own best guess is that the story is simply a subset of Trumps larger corruption and worship of winning. He wants money and he wants to win. Whether he does it legally or who helps him are fine print that don’t matter much.
17/ As he namesake said, if it’s how you describe it, I love it. That all makes him a perfect target for some offering assistance and cash, as Russia was during the whole campaign and after. This isn’t exculpatory. But there’s nothing about Trump that distinguishes ...
18/ between right and wrong, legal or illegal or anything else. There’s winning and there’s money. In any case, there are clearly plenty of folks stuck in US bad, ergo Russia good, ergo witch hunt. Or Assange good, ergo Russia good, ergo witch hunt. Sad, as they say.
19/ This is all a story about plutocracy and autocracy. Let’s see the report.
