US’ new Foreign Malign Influence Center is just official cover for American intelligence interference in domestic politics
By Scott Ritter
May
04, 2021 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.
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.