Which is where traditional news organizations come in play. When the tax returns for Trump were dropped off, they had to verify them. For example, they were particularly worried about a number whose first two digits were not the same font as the other numbers. That seemed to indicate that maybe someone had doctored part of it, but then they found the tax preparer who worked on it and he explained why that was.

Wikileaks has also not, to my knowledge, released any dumps with planted data. I don̈́t know what sort of work they do to verify, but they obviously do something.

That sounds like wishful thinking. The only obvious conclusion you can come to is nobody has successfully contradicted their dumps. It means that and nothing more.

Take the recently leaked audio of John Kerry speaking to Syrian opposition: [1]

And the New York Times, CNN, etc coverage of it: [2]

The New York Times, which shared the most of any news organization (only a couple minutes total) made a number of serious edits:

- They include Kerry espousing the principles of Democracy, but not the fact that he was trying to convince the opposition (which does not want an election, including one overseen by the US) that they might want to have an election.

- The New York Times completely avoids publishing Kerry say that the reason that Russia intervened in Syria was because if they hadn't Daesh was likely to take over the government; and that the US had been hoping to use the ISIS threat as leverage to negotiate American support within the Syrian government.

- The New York Times edited out Kerry's admission that much of the Syrian opposition have allied themselves with "Nusra and Daesh": al Qaeda.

- The clips of Kerry describing how a US invasion of Syria would be completely illegal, whereas Russia was legally invited by the government of Syria got dropped

Etc.

Or, if you're looking for something bigger than proxy war, remember the US coverage of the Snowden Documents? Their censorship of it for a decade as documents before Snowden Docs came out? The fact that most of the media organizations tried to report to Federal authorities than take the story originally? That the major networks towed the official line (even using it's language like "bulk collection") and repeated US denials of specific program elements even with published documents completely contrary to their coverage? Do you remember how the media tried to make the story about "Hero or Zero?" and "Merkle and Obama are having an argument" rather than cover the content of the documents, including the NSA's relationship to mass propaganda programmes, government hacking to benefit private US citizens and industries, and efforts to influence overseas elections?

The traditional media verifiably alters and spins documents, records and stories.

The speculation that "Guccifer 2.0" has done the same thing is just that - speculation.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3grHmI44mg

[2] www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/30/world/middleeast/john-kerry-syria-audio.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

They include Kerry espousing the principles of Democracy, but not the fact that he was trying to convince the opposition (which does not want an election, including one overseen by the US) that they might want to have an election.

I'm not sure what the point here is. The Syrian opposition is a very wide range of groups. I'm pretty sure everyone knows this, no?

The New York Times completely avoids publishing Kerry say that the reason that Russia intervened in Syria was because if they hadn't Daesh was likely to take over the government; and that the US had been hoping to use the ISIS threat as leverage to negotiate American support within the Syrian government.

That simply isn't true.

The second map on http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-27838034 (ie, http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/news/special/2016/newsspec_13854/im...) show this. The Syrian government's core cities (Damascus, Homs, Aleppo) are/were mostly threatened by the Syrian opposition forces (the "FSA").

They say that Daesh was gaining enough strength to threaten Assad in the future, and they hoped that would get Assad to negotiate.

The New York Times edited out Kerry's admission that much of the Syrian opposition have allied themselves with "Nusra and Daesh": al Qaeda.

I haven't listened to the whole tape yet, but I'd note that at the very start the female speaker specifically says they are trying to avoid aligning with Nusra, but that she thinks Nusra is waiting for them to get desperate.

I'm not sure this is editing it out, as opposed to the fact that the Syrian environment is extremely complex and changes rapidly.

The FSA is getting destroyed at the moment, and FSA-aligned groups include a wide range of other groups, which change their alignment with Nusra (and the Kurds) frequently.

The clips of Kerry describing how a US invasion of Syria would be completely illegal, whereas Russia was legally invited by the government of Syria got dropped

I haven't heard this yet, but it sounds correct to me? I don't think anyone in the US is advocating for an invasion are they?

Edit: I've heard this part now. I don't understand what you are saying - is there anything new or controversial to report here?

First: the material that the NYT specifically edited to display wasn't new information. To the contrary, the information edited out would be new information to a lot of people (including yourself if you look at your own comment wrt 'that's not true' and 'most of this is disputable').

Second: the point of the comment, even if you choose to ignore/disbelieve things you do not want to believe wrt Syria, is that the NYT is very selective about what they choose to publish. Indeed, take a look again at what parts the NYT chose to include and what parts got small versus big font, and how context was edited out of the snippets.

> They include Kerry espousing the principles of Democracy, but not the fact that he was trying to convince the opposition (which does not want an election, including one overseen by the US) that they might want to have an election.

I'm speaking here about both the 'majority consensus' of the opposition, and what is spoken by the leadership of the opposition in the leaked audio.

In any case it's an important omission by the New York Times, which is the point of the comment.

> That simply isn't true.

> The second map ...

It definitely is true. I doubt how closely you've followed the Syrian Proxy War.

But the point (again) here is that John Kerry said it, and said it to opposition leaders behind closed doors, and it was edited out.

> I haven't listened to the whole tape yet

Keep listening.

> I haven't heard this yet, but it sounds correct to me? I don't think anyone in the US is advocating for an invasion are they?

There have been many attempts to find a political basis for US coalition invasion of Syria. However at this point the better of those options have run out. The remaining options are:

A. Provoke or simulate Syrian government attacks on US forces (think Tonkin) at which point it is legal based on self-defense.

B. Get invited in by the Syrian government (not likely to happen).

C. Get the UN Security Council to justify it. Unlikely as Russia or China is likely to veto it.

D. Establish a legal argument that the US is justified going in because of atrocity. Right now this would be an uphill legal battle as it is not the consensus that this can justify an invasion.

Other options (besides the diplomatic track) for the US geopolitical objective of regime change include some covert, illegal options such as assassination of key Syrian government officials, more proxy support including of al Sham (al Nusra's new branding), and leverage on Russia/Syria in other contexts (sanctions/economic warfare, more propaganda/information war, etc).

There's current emphasis on the possibility of building support, under the authorities current present, to establish no-fly zones to give Syrian terror/opposition/rebel groups cover for ground offensives and to let off government and Russian strikes.

By who? I mean, I guess there are probably people in the US government who think it is a great idea - but there were people who thought it was a great idea to invade Iran.

I think this thread is a sensible read of the situation: https://www.reddit.com/r/syriancivilwar/comments/55vn65/gene...

Obama certainly doesn't want to invade.

And from the tape it's pretty clear that Kerry was telling them that it isn't going to happen.

You are on the nose: joint chiefs of staff, heads of state and stategists.

Here is a recent piece from the Washington Post "Obama administration considering strikes on Assad, again"

Emphasis on "again".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2016/10/04...

The Obama Administration has made it very clear that there is "no military solution". But that's been an ambition more than it has been a doctrine. The Administration absolutely may change its mind for strategic reasons. And will an election coming up any divergence could happen. The Clinton Campaign's platform on Syria is invasion (Kaine and Clinton have both long advocated for this).

I agree that Kerry is telling the opposition that US invasion is not likely to happen, because of the legal obstacles and because the legislative branch and public opinion inside the United States are against it.

But I've witnessed US propaganda flip the minds of citizens and their legislature many times. It's not impossible in Syria. Just less likely.

More likely is we'll try simultaneously to create no fly zones, we'll send larger amounts of money, weapons and training, and we'll turn on the spigot of non-traditional warfare (lawfare, economic warfare, information warfare, etc).

All in all what it means is that Syria'r proxy war is still a frozen conflict and there's bound to be years left of strife and suffering for the Syrian people.

"U.S. military strikes against the Assad regime will be back on the table Wednesday at the White House, when top national security officials in the Obama administration are set to discuss options for the way forward in Syria. But there’s little prospect President Obama will ultimately approve them."

There are no good options in Syria.

I'm not sure what you are arguing? It's impossible for every piece on Syria to include every single piece of information.

If your point is that the NYTimes is somehow systematically trying to advocate for something, then I'm unsure what that something is.

I guess the US consensus view is:

- ISIS is bad

- Nusra is bad

- Assad is bad

- The Kurdish situation is extremely complex because of Turkey

- Some groups within the FSA alliance are worth supporting

I think the US's state goal is a cessation of hostilities, Assad leaves power and democratic selection of the next government. All of those things are pretty difficult things to achieve.

I don't think any mainstream media is being particularly misleading here?

"The options under consideration, which remain classified, include bombing Syrian air force runways using cruise missiles and other long-range weapons fired from coalition planes and ships, an administration official who is part of the discussions told me. One proposed way to get around the White House’s long-standing objection to striking the Assad regime without a U.N. Security Council resolution would be to carry out the strikes covertly and without public acknowledgment, the official said."

> I'm not sure what you are arguing? It's impossible for every piece on Syria to include every single piece of information. If your point is that the NYTimes is somehow systematically trying to advocate for something, then I'm unsure what that something is.

I think other commenters understand the following: the NYTimes and other 'establishment' media outlets edit and publish material material to cohere with state narrative.

The details left out of media pieces end up being the same details everywhere: the opposition in Syria has a deep relationship with al Qaeda, the US stopped bombing al Qaeda after it changed its name, Russia is there legally, the US primary objective in Syria is regime change and is illegal.

The way you've characterized it is that the media each miss random bits of the story here and there, and each story/outlet can't be comprehensive.

But that's disingenuous. When there's very damning material (thinking of the DIA FOIA document from ~2012, or the Victoria Nuland audio recording) the media inevitably leave out all of the same information they do every time: the context, motivation, objectives and legality that would contradict the state narrative necessary for maintaining government support and sense of legitimacy.

This bit of history with Kerry is just a recent example.

The distraction, misinformation and censorship of the Snowden Documents is another example provided in the very top comment.

But it isn't as simple as that. "The opposition" isn't one group, and no one could ever sensibly claim that it is.

The FSA (such as it is) doesn't have a deep relationship with al Qaeda. But that doesn't mean that there aren't times when there interests align (ie, both are fighting the regime).

No Kurdish group has a deep relationship with al Qaeda, but there are times when they've had agreements to leave each other alone.

BUT, it gets complicated. There are plenty of Islamists groups which aren't al Qaeda/Nusra/ISIS and do have good relationships with the FSA. Groups like Jabhat al-Shamiya[1] fight alongside the FSA, and have sometimes received US aid (while at other times haven't).

the US stopped bombing al Qaeda after it changed its name

Well, no. Even RT is reporting US attacks on Nusra[2]. Interestingly, RT makes the same claim you do, apparently based on this quote: "We did carry out strikes initially, back in 2014-2015, against Nusra. But absolutely, you’re correct in that, as they became intermingled and as they became intermingled in civilian areas, we’ve always sought to limit the possibility of civilian casualties in any of our airstrikes. We wanted to work in a very strategic fashion about how to take out senior Nusra leadership like we’ve done pretty effectively against ISIL. And that doesn’t include just laying waste to populated areas that may be under Nusra’s control.".

That seems pretty well aligned with how the US has been striking at ISIS too.

Russia is there legally

Does anyone dispute this? I think the primary questions about Russia's involvement is around how they are carrying out attacks in Aleppo.

the US primary objective in Syria is regime change and is illegal

How can anyone claim the US has a single primary aim? I think everyone would agree that is one aim of the US: they say that all the time, and it has been widely reported.

It isn't clear how that is illegal: at the moment the peace process seems the primary path towards settlement, and that is what the US is engaged in.

The US isn't going around bombing Assad in Damascus or anything (not withstanding the attack on Syrian troops a week or two ago, which didn't help with anything!)

[1] https://medium.com/@ryanmofarrell/jabhat-al-shamiya-is-one-o...

[2] https://www.rt.com/usa/361519-pentagon-airstrike-al-nusra/

You've described a kind of unsatisfied state with how to understand the facts, but have not yet overtly agreed that not only does US media not communicate how to understand these facts or explore their complexities - but that US media does not make the facts themselves available, preferring to exclude and obscure them.

I think we can both agree that the US media could service the American public much better if it both presented the unsavory, contradictory-to-state-narrative facts and if it deeply explored the complexities of these facts rather than resort to obscurantism like "it's complicated and there are a lot of factions on the ground and not EVERY person in the opposition has a relationship to groups formally recognized by the United States as terrorists."

That said, here's an attempt to respond to the confusion in the above comment about those complexities.

> the opposition in Syria has a deep relationship with al Qaeda

The point here is that not only are al Qaeda and ISIS incredible strategic assets to the opposition that is very important to its military success, but that the way this gets explained in US media is it gets excluded entirely.

It's not enough to point at my one line summary and say it's not enough. It's the US medias job to write non-one-line non-summaries that explain how very deeply embedded the opposition is with al Qaeda and the complexities thereof, and the legal quagmire that the US is in.

Jabhat al Sham is another great example of an extremist group that, in other circumstances the US would freely designate a terrorist organization, but fluxuates in doing so for it's objectives in Syria.

> the US stopped bombing al Qaeda after it changed its name

It did indeed for many months. Given your article is from yesterday and does not indicate that al Nusra (al Sham) was being bombed but just that a leader was a target objective of a bombing elsewhere, I'd need to do some reading.

The claim is not based on the Mark Toner/John Kirby statement, but reports from US journalists out of the DoD Press Office, State Department - National Security reporter exchanges, the stopping of bombing reports from the Pentagon for that group, and 'leaky intelligence' from the Russian, Syrian, American and Qatari (via al Jazeera) sides.

> Russia is there legally

> Does anyone dispute this? I think the primary questions about Russia's involvement is around how they are carrying out attacks in Aleppo.

There's been many questions and rumors in the US media about Russian activities in Syria depending on whatever currently is making Washington's life difficult.

> the US primary objective in Syria is regime change and is illegal

Nobody claimed here that there is a single aim. "Primary objective" is a technical term.

It's very clear how regime change is illegal. The US has hoped to achieve a political process whereby it achieves its objective without having to commit to too many illegal activities along the way. Of course that's been difficult and the Obama Administration is again considering illegally invading Syria to achieve the objective.

The question now is:

A. Will the US be able to foment a political transition away from Assad in a way that replaces the regime with one open to the future geopolitical objectives (wrt energy security, arming of Hezbollah, transit for Iran) of US allies?

B. If it is not able to achieve the political transition it wants, or one at all, how will it then intervene?

C. If a future political solution looks insurmountable, will the US choose to pump weapons into the opposition? Will it try to find a legal argument to invade Syria? Will it covertly break international law and directly attack the Syrian government (as it has several times already)?

D. Is it possible that a new administration would cut a deal in Syria to exit the geopolitical situation to focus on counter-terrorism and stabilization?

Etc.

> The US isn't going around bombing Assad in Damascus or anything

It is engaged in other types of warfare, including encouraging officials from the government to defect, attacking it's command and control structures to make it less effective at warfighting, grounding it air force with sabotage and cyber sabotage, etc.

Anyway, remember, bombing Syrian government facilities and personnel is on the table as per the article from yesterday.

Also, I'm not sure if time is serving either one of us well on this topic any more. We seem to agree, at least implicitly, about the primary driver of the thread: the dominant narrative presented by US media is the state narrative, even as this means US news organizations edit material selectively.

It's also very convenient to lump all alternative news source in with the Infowars and Brietbarts. The reality is that there are a plethora of disparate media outlets of varying quality that are covering legitimate stories from legitimate (at least by NY Times standards) sources - stories that are simply not covered elsewhere. People should be free, and indeed encouraged, to get their information from a variety of sources. The implication that people are drinking either full-establishment or full-Infowars kool-aid is false. People have lost trust in the mainstream media, for good reason, and they are searching for alternatives. That doesn't mean they agree with anything and everything that can be found.

And finally, please tell me, why would all the top DNC heads resign over the Guccifer leaks if they were all forged and fabricated?

What's the old saying, facts have a liberal bias?

I'm not a Trump supporter, either, but I am baffled by how ignorant some Democrats have become to this stuff given the relative cynicism and insight that prevailed during the Bush years, especially concerning Iraq. She acts a lot like Bush and we can expect a very similar administration from her. It's sickening, honestly, as people will die and suffer for our ignorance.

- IQ testing

- Evolutionary psychology

- GMOs

- Child development

- Economics

The more you buy into it the more susceptible you become to baseless conspiracy theories. Because it's always easier to believe that the people you are told to hate deserve the hate than to consider that you were duped.

It scares me how many smart people are playing right into the Bernays/Goebbels/Chavez playbook.

I disagree. That would disqualify too many things, including Trump's 1995 tax return, the Snowden documents, and so on.

We should be aware of the potential bias the leaker has, but that shouldn't stop us from objectively looking at the data.

http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/299236-alleged-gucci...

Good information warfare doesn't forge everything. It weaves the lies in with the truth so it becomes indiscernible what is truth and what is not. The truth is what sells the deception.

My guess is that the very vast majority of these documents are real and should be taken very seriously.

Now, it does look like they may be from DCCC and not the Clinton Foundation - Guccifer 2.0 in this case being a stupid, bragging and amateurish hacker.

From a single data point? You don't.

You need to be able to gain the same information from other sources to corroborate it, and weighted based upon trust criteria. A known good trustworthy source in your web of trust outweighs neutral sources. A series of confirmations from other, disparate, seemingly-trustworthy sources that do not have a likely bias toward the information also count positively.

At the end of the day some part of it is subjective, yes, but you can gain confidence in the accuracy of a source with third-party corroboration.

But we should look to corroborate that information in addition to corroborate information from the Panama Papers, given the importance and implications of the information and the incentives for the sources to alter and selectively leak information.

Sure, you could make that argument based upon your own web of trust.

Crowdstrike and others that have given this Russian intelligence attribution are higher in my web of trust than an anonymous Russian-appearing hacktivist, largely because they are people are in my own social circle and personal network. Believing that attribution and having an understanding of the history of Russian tradecraft and its current political leadership, I'll verify before trusting in this case. I'll assume something in here is likely faked, forged, or set up to deceive in some way.

Not believing it is Russian intelligence but likely highly partisan, I will maintain my skepticism given the timing of this release and the fact that this hacktivist has only been anti-Clinton late in an election cycle.

Remember the Britam hack? Private security company Britam got hacked, tons of internal documents released. Among them one "smoking gun": that the company had allegedly been offered a contract to stage a fake chemical attack in Syria.

It was just that this mail had fake headers, transparently copied from another mail in the same archive.

There was also another attempt to plant a false flag narrative in another hack, of the private mail of a US officer in Egypt.

This Guccifer has alreadly bumbled once by (apparently) not being aware of all the metadata that leaks into MS documents. We know they use Russian keyboards... So, you're right to not trust them by default. But also, it's too easy to dismiss anything they leak - faking data is hard.