In mid-July 2014, Time attempted an antiviral intervention
against the first Internet hoax involving NSA leaker Edward Snowden. "Why Iran
Believes the Militant Group ISIS Is an American Plot" read the
headline above a lead that began, "Conspiracy theories are nothing new in
the Middle East…."
This particular rumor, said Time, had
"assumed truthlike proportions through multiple reposts and links."
It postulated a secret U.S., British and Israeli op—codenamed "Hornet's
Nest"—hatching the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) to
attract terrorists worldwide to so vex the region that Israel's enemies would
be in Biblical disarray. Time traced
the hoax to Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), which Time accused of "concocting an obviously
fictional fake Snowden interview to bolster the narrative." Six days later,
IRNA
reacted testily, complaining that Time
(which it called "Times") had smeared IRNA's report as "fabricated"
without once referring to its original source, billionaire Pierre Omidyar's online startup The Intercept.
The problem is that, between its February 10, 2014 launch and July 14, The
Intercept had posted 258 pages of NSA documents
leaked by Snowden and numerous articles based on those leaks, but hadn't said a word
about Israel's national intelligence arm, the Mossad, grooming ISIS leader Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi as chief stinger for the Hornet's Nest. In the 30-day run-up
to July 6, when the story first surfaced, The
Intercept published just four articles, none of which mentioned Mossad or al-Baghdadi.
"Hornet's Nest" occurred twice on The Intercept's website, in comments posted by reader Kelly on July
21 and July
29—weeks after the hoax began—both in the context of Hamas being ill-advised to stir the metaphorical
Israeli hornet's nest causing the "entire swarm" to attack; her comment had nothing to do with a secret U.S., British and Israeli op involving ISIS. It's also significant that in rebuttal to Time, IRNA neglects to include a single
hyperlink to The Intercept or any of "several
other news outlets" that IRNA claims "also published The Intercept story." As we shall
see, this omission of links to sources is de rigueur for articles spreading the
hoax.
Ironically, among those failing
to link crucial documents is Time
itself, which somehow forgets to point us to what it calls IRNA's "scoop"
that supposedly started the fuss. Instead we're linked to the Tehran
Times, where Time says an English translation of IRNA's scoop "recently"
appeared—only to be confronted with the Tehran Times home page, not any
specific article. Using the site's search function, we get 50 hits on the
keyword "Snowden," but none more recent than April 2014 and none
translating IRNA's scoop. To conclude that IRNA "concocted an obviously
fictional fake Snowden interview," a reader must rely on the opinion of Time's Middle East Bureau Chief, Aryn
Baker. That leaves rigorous debunkers unfulfilled.
Regrettably, not knowing the
date of IRNA's scoop, or being able to view its text online, complicates investigation.
The earliest available evidence of the Snowden Hoax is a July 6 post in Arabic
with a title that roughly translates as "Snowden: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the
result of a three-nation intelligence cooperation."
Its pseudonymous author is "shababek,"
which is also the name of the website where it is posted within a German
domain, www.shababek.de. All of the elements of the nascent hoax are in place.
Edward Snowden is said to have revealed that the NSA, together with Britain's secret
intelligence service MI6 and Israel's Mossad, "paved the way for the emergence" of ISIS as part of "an old
British plan known as the 'Hornet's Nest' for the protection of the Zionist
entity." Al-Baghdadi underwent "intensive," year-long military
training "at the hands of the Mossad." The source of Snowden's revelations
is The Intercept. There are no hyperlinks.
Social media puts a face to
"shababek." The Twitter
account @shababekT is active but contains only three tweets, in Arabic, all
from August 2012 and two containing busted links to the website www.shababek.de.
The profile photo shows a well-groomed, black-haired man in his 40s with goatee,
dressed in a conventional business suit with necktie, above the name Kareem Al
baidani. The same photo adorns the Facebook page of Abosamir
Albaidani, who posts in Arabic, most recently in October 2013, and
self-identifies as a graduate engineer. Some of these posts too contain broken
links to www.shababek.de. A different photo of the same man, taken later
judging from his graying goatee, is on the Facebook page of Kareem Al-Baidani,
who likewise posts in Arabic, mainly about Iraq and most recently in March
2014, and again with nonfunctional links to www.shababek.de. Without reading Arabic, one can glean from the Internet that Kareem Al-Baidani is an Iraqi Shiite writer
based in Munich, Germany. His
Facebook photo is copyright Irak Heute
Programm, which is German for Iraq Today
program. A TV show by that name—"Al-Iraq Alyom" (Iraq Today)—appears
on Al-Alam, an Arabic news channel broadcasting from Iran by the state-owned
media corporation Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting.
These
tenuous connections between an Iraqi Shiite writer and Iran's state-controlled
media are at most suggestive. We cannot say definitively that Kareem Al-Baidani
is Hoaxer Zero, whose three-part inventions about the NSA, MI6 and Mossad
hornet's nest exposed by Edward Snowden found a ready audience, initially in
the Middle East but soon around the world. Nevertheless, we can note that a day
after he posted the hoax online, it was picked up—word for word—on the Arabic
website Iraq Now, with an expanded title: "Snowden: Abu Bakral-Baghdadi, the result of a three-nation intelligence cooperation and trainedby the Israeli Mossad." The following day, the Arabic version of Iran's
semi-official Fars News Agency (FNA) ran the story, again identical to Al-Baidani's original but with a snappier
headline: "Snowden:Baghdadi underwent an intensive course at the hands of Mossad."
FNA was no stranger to
Snowden-related stories of shady provenance. In January 2014 and in apparent
seriousness, FNA published "Snowden Documents Proving "US-Alien-Hitler" Link Stun Russia" to the effect that space
aliens run the U.S. government. (No jokes, please.) It linked to a piece posted the previous
day at whatdoesitmean.com that relied on, but provided no link to, a "stunning"
report from Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB). Neither of these articles linked
to any Snowden docs. And more than a year before, Fars had republished as straight
reporting a piece from The Onion's
satirical website claiming that a Gallup poll found rural white Americans
preferred Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then president of Iran, over U.S. President
Obama. So it's entirely consistent for a propaganda arm of the Iranian
government to disseminate disinformation by invoking that internationally
recognized paragon of truthfulness, Edward Snowden. In this case, Fars would be
especially motivated by a threat much closer to home than space aliens. About
90% of Iranians are Shia, which is the official state religion; only 9% are
Sunni or Sufi. ISIS, by contrast, grew out of the Sunni insurgency and built
its violent reputation by brutalizing Shia Muslims. Naturally Iran would strive
to defame the hated and feared ISIS and al-Baghdadi through association with
the demonic three-headed hydra U.S., Britain and Israel.
Citing FNA as an impeccable
authority, the hoax next began to spread in languages other than Arabic. Just
two days after Kareem Al-Baidani's brainchild
emerged from its birth canal, Al-Manar—a Beirut-based Lebanese satellite TV
station affiliated with the Shia Islamist terrorist organization Hezbollah—published
the story in Spanish, titled "Snowden:
el líder del EI fue formado por el Mossad israelí." Al-Manar added a decorative touch by illustrating its
piece with a posed photo of NBC News anchorman Brian Williams and Edward
Snowden taken to promote NBC's May 2014 exclusive interview with the leaker, televised
41 days before Al-Manar
published this article that never mentions said interview. The picture of two
men seated pensively in front of tasteful, well-stocked wooden bookcases just
looks good, is all.
Finally, three days into the
hoax, an article appeared that linked to a reputable news outlet. At last! Baghdad-based
Iraqi satellite TV network Alsumaria's "Snowden:
Al-Baghdadi is the product of three intelligence cooperation"
identified its source with the familiar hyperlinked
logo of Arabic CNN. Alas, this led merely to the homepage and no specific
story. Good luck finding Alsumaria's source. The blog Going
Global East Meets West soon followed suit by linking its story to the "original
source" that turned out to be—you guessed it—Alsumaria's report relying on
an unspecified post at Arabic CNN. The Snowden Hoax had now become circular and
self-contained. Whereas earlier versions simply omitted sources outright and
unashamedly, subsequent iterations would cite them as sources.
Five days in, the hoax
transitioned to Persian with "Snowden: Abu Bakral-Baghdadi made in Britain, America and Mossad," published by Salam Times. The article cited the Iranian
Students' News Agency, run by university students, but contained no links. That
same day, the hoax debuted in French with Croah's "Snowden confirme que Al Baghdadi a été formé par le MOSSAD," linking to Al-Manar's day-old French translation of its two-day old Spanish report.
On July 19, scarcely two weeks
after Kareem Al-Baidani cooked it up in
Munich and the same day Time sought
to discredit it, the Snowden Hoax arrived in America. InfoWars, the website of
popular broadcaster Alex Jones, gave us "NSA
Doc Reveals ISIS Leader al-Baghdadi is U.S., British and Israeli Intelligence
Asset." It led off with an Editor's Note (never a good sign) stating
that writer Kurt Nimmo's piece was based on "a document recently released
by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden" (no link thereto), the validity of which
"cannot be verified due to the exclusivity of the Snowden cache." So
it was released (to whom?) but nevertheless remains secret. InfoWars said the
cache was being kept by The New York
Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, journalist Barton Gellman,
filmmaker Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, the ACLU, Electronic Frontier
Foundation and others, but didn't speculate as to why none of those privileged
parties had breathed a word about the Mossad training al-Baghdadi. Those who
had Snowden's ear and his stolen documents were strangely silent on this
sensational story, whereas those covering it hadn't spoken to Snowden and were
denied access to the documents about which they were reporting. Welcome to the
upside-down, inside-out world of the Snowden Hoax.
As it happened, on August 6,
Glenn Greenwald—principal keeper of the Snowden cache—did belatedly
weigh in on the story. Starting more than three weeks before, 10 people had
tweeted intermittently to Greenwald (renowned for his intense daily engagement
on Twitter) alerting him to the hoax, providing links to false reports, and
respectfully asking him to refute the fraud. Finally, London-based freelance
journalist Sunny Hundal tweeted: "@ggreenwald Just to confirm, did Snowden
ever say the ISIS chief al-Baghdadi was trained by Mossad? Hearing it all over
FB [Facebook]." Greenwald replied immediately:
"I've never heard him say any such thing, nor have I ever heard any
credible source quoting him saying anything like that." On August 10, Greenwald reiterated: "I've never seen anywhere where he said that, nor any documents that suggest it." At exactly the same time, down to the minute, Snowden's ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner coincidentally concurred in a single-word tweet: "Hoax."
A few days after The Moroccan Times published "Former
CIA agent: 'The ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was trained by the Israeli
Mossad,'" it appended its own EDITOR'S NOTE, going InfoWars one better
by using ALL CAPS: "Time Magazine has released on July 19, 2014 an article
arguing that this story, which was reported by many Iranian sources including
Iran News Agency, is a conspiracy theory from Iran and that it is not true.
Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that though the piece of news went viral
on the net, Snowden did not refute the claims of the Iranian News Agency."
In the quaint intellectual discipline of logic, asserting that a proposition is
true because it hasn't been proven false is called argumentum ad ignorantiam (argument from ignorance). Since The Moroccan Times intrepidly elevates
this informal fallacy to the level of an EDITOR'S NOTE, it's doubtful they'd be
much impressed by Greenwald's or Wizner's tweets. After all, it wasn't Snowden himself refuting the hoax. So it must be
true.
Two days after Greenwald spoke out, his rival WikiLeaks chimed in, tweeting: "#Snowden docs reveal #ISIS trained by Mossad—falsely
claims #Bahrain gov affiliated newspaper Gulf Daily News." A link was
provided thereto. "It is," WikiLeaks resumed
in a follow-on tweet, "intentional fabrication by or accepted by the
Bahraini government affiliated news site Gulf Daily News." WikiLeaks
seemed unaware that Gulf Daily News almost
word-for-word plagiarized the Som Daily
News story published four days before. Over an hour later, WikiLeaks tried
again, tweeting: "Ground zero for false 'Snowden docs show ISIS leader
trained by Mossad' story goes back to last month in Algeria." This time the
link was to Algérie1.com's "Snowden:
« Le chef de l’EIIL, Al Baghdadi, a été formé par le Mossad » [Snowden: 'The
head of EIIL, Al Baghdadi, was trained by Mossad']." The Algerian article was dated
July 11—three days after Iran's Fars News
Agency ran the story. Hardly ground zero, Julian.
In any case, Twitter's role in spreading the
Snowden Hoax was instrumental. To measure its effect, a search was conducted to find tweets containing all three names "Mossad al-Baghdadi Snowden" within the 30-day range July 8–August 7,
2014. The results were entered into a database, omitting only tweets where the
sender questioned the rumor's authenticity. The goal was to capture tweets
promoting the hoax, not doubting or disputing it.
A total of 1219 tweets was compiled from 1016 unique senders. Nearly 89% (903) of senders tweeted just once, accounting for 74% of the database. Among the 11% who tweeted twice or more (113 senders for a combined 316 tweets), only two hit double digits: @kelpo1002 (27), who tweeted in French to more than 1K followers, and @AnonOperations2 (11), who tweeted in English to 560+ followers. Based on this analysis and on a visual review of every tweet collected, it seems unlikely any were generated by automated methods such as bots. These have the look and feel of genuine tweets from real people.
A total of 1219 tweets was compiled from 1016 unique senders. Nearly 89% (903) of senders tweeted just once, accounting for 74% of the database. Among the 11% who tweeted twice or more (113 senders for a combined 316 tweets), only two hit double digits: @kelpo1002 (27), who tweeted in French to more than 1K followers, and @AnonOperations2 (11), who tweeted in English to 560+ followers. Based on this analysis and on a visual review of every tweet collected, it seems unlikely any were generated by automated methods such as bots. These have the look and feel of genuine tweets from real people.
Spikes on July 10 and July 14 correspond to publication of, respectively:
somdailynews.com: "Snowden confirms that Al Baghdadi was trained by MOSSAD" [expired]
somdailynews.com: "Snowden confirms that Al Baghdadi was trained by MOSSAD" [expired]
Relevant page associated with each website:
http://somdailynews.com/snowden-confirms-that-al-baghdadi-was-trained-by-mossad/ [expired]
In conclusion, more than 30
days after its initial outbreak, the Snowden Hoax continues unchecked. Any
notion that WikiLeaks might halt the spread was quickly dispelled, due mainly to their clumsily
worded tweet: "#Snowden docs reveal #ISIS trained by Mossad—falsely
claims #Bahrain gov affiliated newspaper Gulf Daily News." Some readers
missed or misunderstood the throwaway "falsely claims" and
took it as confirmation of the
hoax by WikiLeaks, the organization Snowden himself had praised to the sky: "They are absolutely fearless in putting
principles above politics. Their efforts to build a transnational culture of
transparency and source protection are extraordinary. They run towards the
risks everyone else runs away from."
No surprise, then, that among the replies posted directly were
these:
Sheba @sahi_100:
"I could well believe this."
Naheed R @naheedR:
"Doesn't surprise one bit. They all look like bad actors."
Abdul Rahman @Engr_AR:
"Agree, shame on Mossad."
nu2twitr @4in4mation:
"Filthy Zionist Jews are Behind ISIS Terror Group."
Within 24 hours of posting, WikiLeaks's tweet had been
retweeted 465 times by readers to their followers, and marked as a favorite 155
times. (In contrast, Greenwald's by then three-day-old tweet still hadn't made it out of single digits for either RTs or favorites.) Abandoning the orphaned "falsely," some readers extracted the first clause as a standalone, unqualified endorsement, attributing to WikiLeaks the very untruth that WikiLeaks had sought to expose.
the
hermawans @KerjaInterior: "RT @wikileaks: #Snowden docs reveal #ISIS
trained by Mossad."
Riswandha Risang
@r_risang: "Snowden docs reveal that ISIS trained by Mossad –
Wikileaks."
David Plater
@PlaterDavid: "'@wikileaks: #Snowden docs reveal #ISIS trained by
Mossad.' So @foreignoffice @StateDept What does yr intel say?"
Hell, David, at this point, after the feverish onslaught of a month-long infection by the Snowden Hoax, it might be a relief to see a tweet from the verified U.S. Department of State @StateDept account conceding, once and for all, that Snowden's phantom NSA documents and imaginary interviews do indeed prove that Mossad trained al-Baghdadi and that Operation Hornet's Nest is real. Maybe then these loonies on the Internet will give it a rest.
Nah. Who am I kidding? They're like the alien seed pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They're here already! You're next! You're next!
