Brennan Calls Out the Press for Giving ISIS More Credit Than They Deserve

Both James Clapper and John Brennan appeared at the Aspen Security Forum this week (it was Brennan’s first appearance, apparently). As I may lay out, Clapper was by far the more measured of the two. But this exchange, between Brennan and Dina Temple-Raston, deserves more attention. She notes that ISIS gets credit for attacks (she doesn’t name any, but I’d point to the San Bernardino killing and the Orlando massacre) that seem incidentally motivated at the last minute by ISIS, but generally are motivated by other issues.

To his credit, Brennan blames the press for crediting ISIS with these attacks.

Temple-Raston: It seems that people get credit for being an ISIS adherent just by having a brief flirtation online with the group. And I wonder if by calling something an ISIS attack so readily, which we seem to do, whether or not we’re giving ISIS more credit than it deserves.

Brennan: When you say “calling something an ISIS attack” that we’re prone to do, you’re talking about the media, right?

[Laughter, Brennan not exactly smiling, then later smiling]

Temple-Raston: No.

[More laughter]

Temple-Raston: I just wonder if you can’t say that it’s an opportunistic attack, as opposed to an ISIS attack.

But then Brennan goes on and notes that getting credit for such attacks is part of ISIS’s strategy.

Brennan: Sometimes I think ISIL doesn’t know themselves. I think most times they don’t. If somebody has been encouraged and incited by ISIL, they have no idea if that was the real motivation. Even if somebody is found with literature in their apartment that might reflect ISIL’s, you know, narrative, that doesn’t mean that they carried it out for that. It may mean that they, you know, woke up that day and wanted to commit suicide and wanted to take others down with them. But, it is part of ISIL’s strategy to have people that they can deploy, directly, that they can support directly, as well as to encourage and provide indirect direction and incitement to individuals. They will claim credit for a lot of things and they feel as though this is part of their brand.

Therein is the rub. If this is part of ISIS’ strategy, then having the media — and FBI (or, in other countries, other security organizations) — give them credit for it only serves to play to their strength.

Both Brennan and Temple-Raston remained silent about FBI’s role in this process, leaking details about affiliation with ISIS. But that — and the budget driving impulse that is a part of the motivation for it — is as much a part of the problem as the media’s rush to label things ISIS.

Democracy Has Always Been Post-Factual

In my earlier post on Brexit, I pointed to this comment, which has gotten a lot of attention. I agree with what the comment said about swapping elites (its first point) and the impact on the young (its second). But I don’t agree with the third:

Thirdly and perhaps most significantly, we now live in a post-factual democracy. When the facts met the myths they were as useless as bullets bouncing off the bodies of aliens in a HG Wells novel.

I’m not saying that the Brexit side told the truth about the downsides of exiting. Indeed, within hours of victory, Ukip leader Nigel Farage admitted a key claim made in Brexit propaganda, that the UK would save £350 million a week that could be put into social services like the National Health Service (which got cut significantly under Cameron) was a “mistake.”

I’m not even saying that this election, in the UK, was not exception in terms of the bald propaganda unleashed. I haven’t seen that measured, but everything I’ve heard reports that it was awful.

Still, what does it mean that we live in a post-factual democracy? I thought, at first, that the US is just ahead of its cousin, in that we’ve had WMD and birther lies for over a decade. But the UK had the very same WMD lies. Indeed, both countries have proudly lied about national security secrets for decades, centuries in England.

Plus, as I thought back in US history, I couldn’t get to a time when democracy didn’t depend on some key, big lies. Remarkably, they’re still some of the very same lies mobilized in the Brexit vote. You don’t get a United States, you don’t get a British Empire, without spewing a lot of lies about the inferiority of black (brown, beige, continental) men. You don’t get America, as it currently exists, without the myth of American exceptionalism, the unique national myth that has served to root an increasingly diverse former colony. You don’t get Britain without certain beliefs, traced back to Matthew Arnold and earlier, about the enobling force of British culture.

Those myths are precisely what have driven the democracy of both countries for a long time. They were a way of imposing discipline, privilege, and selective cohesion such that less privileged members of those included in the myth would buy in and tolerate the other inequities without undue violence.

They’re really the same myths deployed by some in Brexit: the immigrants, not the austerity policies, are taking your jobs and disrupting your English way of life.

Perhaps we’re moving closer to a fact-based democracy. Access to rebut sanctioned lies is more readily accessible, though the scaffold of spying makes it harder to release, except in bulk. We’re becoming more cosmopolitan, too. At least some voted Remain for that reason — the old nationalism has been dented in the decades of a failed European experiment.

But make no mistake, the myths have always been there. We’re still trying to break free.

The Politico Villagers Go Deer Hunting!

Well, this is exciting! Yesterday on Morning Joe on MSNBC, Mike Allen of Politico proudly announced that he, the managing editor at Politico, John Harris, and Politico executive editor Jim VanderHei all went on their first deer hunt Monday. And, according to Allen, they ALL bagged a large mammal from the Cervidae family.

In plain English, all three of these first time rookie deer hunters managed to take time off from chasing unnamed sources, get dressed, get out of town, track their prey, shoot and kill a real live deer. These are clearly some awesome American Sportsmen!

This would also mean they are such studs that they tracked and finalized the kill on each of the three deer, field cleaned their prey and transported the large carcasses out of the wilds, back to their vehicles, loaded and secured the bodies and drove out of the hunting fields. And they were all back safe and sound at home in time to get a night’s sleep and be in a studio at the crack of dawn to do Morning Joe! Astounding!

All it took was a few hours apparently. These guys must be damn good, because when I was younger, I used to deer hunt with three older men that were knock down dead eye pros, we went for 3-4 days at a time to open the season, and never had the kind of success that beginners Allen, VanderHei and Harris did in seemingly just a few short hours. My coonskin hat is off to all three of them; this is a truly impressive feat.

I am kind of shocked they didn’t run into Dick Cheney, kind of sounds like his type of “hunting” expedition. But, as Allen’s face did not have buckshot oozing from it, I guess not they did not encounter Deadeye Dick. I tried emailing and phoning the three intrepid hunters for more details of their safari, but they failed to return contact.

Fortunately, in an Emptywheel exclusive, we were able to obtain video of the grand hunt!

Fellatio for Cheney from the Politico

I guess it’s no surprise that Dick Cheney chose Pool Boy and his two sidekicks, John Harris and Mike Allen, for his first propaganda piece after stepping down as Vice President. And it was a good choice for Cheney, as they apparently assiduously avoided any of the questions that Cheney ought to be asked.

For example, when Cheney asserted,

Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”

Real journalists might have asked, "then why the fuck didn’t we finish the job in Afghanistan rather than turning our attention to a war of choice in Iraq?"

Similarly, when Cheney said,

*The potential consequences of $1 trillion in deficit stimulus spending: “It’s huge, obviously – potentially huge. You worry about what ultimately happens to inflation. You worry about what’s going to happen to the ability of the government to borrow money. … I’m nervous.”

Real journalists might have asked why Cheney showed no concern when he was racking up $1 trillion (and counting) of deficit spending for the aforementioned war of choice in Iraq. For that matter, real journalists might even have asked what happened to Cheney’s claim that "Reagan proved deficits don’t matter," now that he’s out of office.

But I suppose it would take more than a real journalist–it would take a DFH blogger, most likely–to point out that, in fact, many people did foresee the colossal fuck-up the Bush Administration was making of the economy.

*Whether the Bush administration should have done more about the economy: "We did worry about it, to some extent. … I don’t think anybody actually foresaw something of this size and dimension occurring. It’s also global. We only control part of the world economy – a very important part."  

The article ends by quoting Liz Cheney teasing her dad that he doesn’t need a press aide–he can do it on his own. And I guess, given that he did such a good job of arranging a fluffer designed to attack Obama some more for reversing Dick’s failed policies–Liz Cheney has it about right.