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    Alex Gibney goes Russiagate Archived Message

    Posted by Raskolnikov on September 22, 2020, 8:01 am

    https://www.dumptheguardian.com/film/2020/sep/22/agents-of-chaos-alex-gibney-trump-russia-film

    Alex Gibney's latest documentary is out on HBO tomorrow. Gibney is a strange one; he's made some excellent films that speak truth to power: "Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream", "Taxi to the Dark Side", "Enron: The Smarters Guys in the Room" and also the recent "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley" (which I recommmend, and if not that film then any film or book about the Theranos/Elizabeth Holmes case as it is an astonishing story and she seems to have completely escaped any punishment and is strangely protected; there is some suggestion of MIC involvement in Theranos which might explain things. I posted about it here to no interest at all). But he's also made infamously bad films like "We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks" which Chris Hedges called "agitprop for the security and surveillance state," adding that it "dutifully peddles the state's contention that WikiLeaks is not a legitimate publisher and that Chelsea Manning, who passed half a million classified Pentagon and State Department documents to WikiLeaks, is not a legitimate whistle-blower.".

    Somewhere along the line he seems to have been bought. Now he turns his attention to Russian interference in the 2016 election. This article/review is amazing for its constant attempts to make something out of nothing.

    Last month, the US Senate intelligence committee published over 1,000 pages of findings on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. In a different world – or, at least, a more sane one, the kind oriented away from the distrustful chaos desired by Russian intelligence – the bipartisan report would have landed with the frisson of anticipation surrounding the Mueller report in April 2019. But in a hyper-polarized, disaster-numbed nation, its relatively damning findings faded quickly under at least seven layers of justifiably frantic news cycles.

    Look at that for a triumph of circular reasoning and complete absence of factual analysis. This report didn't receive any notice because Russian intelligence inspired distrustful chaos. The "relatively damning" (wtf does that even mean?) findings faded quickly. If there had been ANYTHING solid in the report the "resistance media" would have been whipping it like a dead horse. Perhaps it just wasn't that important.

    It goes on with this trying to make nothing seem like something in almost every paragraph.

    Agents of Chaos, a two-part investigative HBO series on Russian interference in the 2016 election, confirms some of the most damning findings of the Senate report – for one, extensive contacts between the Trump campaign, particularly former manager Paul Manafort, and “a cadre of individuals ostensibly operating outside of the Russian government but who nonetheless implement Kremlin-directed influence operations.” But the series, from Oscar-winning film-maker Alex Gibney, also visualizes, with first-person interviews from some of the major figures, what the rare bipartisan consensus (on facts, not narrative) cannot: the diffuse, dubiously quantifiable efforts by the Russian government – sometimes tightly organized, sometimes slapdash – to sow chaos in Ukraine and then America, the profit motives which compelled bumbling Trump figures into a “collusion” of mutual interest, and the head-spinning vertigo for average American consumers over what even happened four years ago.

    Agents of Chaos finds no single story, operation, locus of blame, or clear measure of impact by the Russian government. Instead, it explores a common purpose employed by both Russia and pro-Trump players in the US, sometimes in tandem and sometimes covertly. “Using chaos to amass power,” said Gibney.

    So it finds nothing, but somebody read "The Shock Doctrine" while they were making the film.

    The four-hour series takes a broad look at Russian interference, delineating strategies that often get conflated into one enemy – an oil slick of reports and testimony difficult to pin into verifiable coherence. Gibney classifies efforts by the Russian government or Russian business interests – given the top-down structure of corruption in the country, it’s difficult to discern the two – to sow chaos in America into four categories: disinformation campaigns orchestrated by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the so-called “troll factory” which injected divisive meme campaigns and partisan accounts into American social media discourse; sophisticated cyber-attacks, such as the one by the GRU, a Russian government intelligence agency, which leaked Democratic National Committee emails in 2016; Russian hackers’ infiltration into state election systems, which are criminally out of date and vulnerable to manipulation; and stoking an information system primed for outrage by widely broadcasting and encouraging support for an inexperienced showman and would-be oligarch named Donald Trump.

    Again, look at all the qualifiers and any documentary that says something is "difficult to pin into verifiable coherence" isn't dealing in facts. And then, way down the page, they talk about the film's sources:

    Agents of Chaos fleshes out a “three-ring circus” of interference efforts with a who’s who of state and security actors, including former employees of the “troll farm” in Russia and a Russian journalist whose investigations into Putin associates earned him death threats, credible security concerns, and a severed bull head delivered to his office. Gibney interviews several top-level intelligence officials, such as lead prosecutor of the Mueller investigation Andrew Weissmann, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, former CIA director John Brennan, and Celeste Wallander, the former National Security Council director under Obama and a Russian foreign policy expert. Private investigator Glenn Simpson, who authorized the controversial and sensational dossier by Christopher Steele, speaks to Manafort’s shady connections to a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska.

    And you wonder why they "found" evidence of Russian interference.

    And still they go on with the misdirection which by this time has almost become an apology for the film:

    “The Mueller report tried so hard not to tell a story that it failed,” said Gibney. “Because it just presented facts as if it was one magnificent phone book, and the phone book contains lots of facts, but it doesn’t have much of a story.”

    Which isn’t to say Agents of Chaos finds conspiracy so much as evidence of mutual greed, and a literacy of the hunger for power; many in the Trump orbit’s goal was “just to make money,” said Gibney, “and in pursuit of that, they end up doing a lot of things that people misinterpreted as being somehow policy-based or enmeshed in some kind of spy game.”

    That's some astonishing bullshit. It failed because it just stuck to the facts but we didn't find anything either. Jesus. The sound of a barrel being scraped gets louder every day in fraudian towers.

    And then finally, another couple of tortured paragraphs basically admitting "there isn't anything here but that's not the point":

    Agents of Chaos finds the Russian efforts, as well, to be both more scattershot and insidious than many would assume. “People are always looking for the strategy,” says Wallander in the second episode. “That fundamentally misunderstands a Russian operation. They seed multiple elements, and then they go with what works.”

    Arguably, what worked best is the entrenchment of the perception that Russia could have a consequential impact on America’s election. As the New Yorker argued this month, the loose murk of the Russian meddling story, which easily lends to conspiracy and distrust, is more important than quantifiable impact. Regardless of debates on quantifying impact, “if the goal is disruption and confusion, then being seen to affect outcomes is as good as actually affecting outcomes.”

    I will have to watch this now just to see quite how little they dig up. I'm wondering how they will cover the "Masturbation is a sin: with Jesus we can beat it together" facebook adverts

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