Was someone defending Counterpoints here recently?

[Mark Thibodeau]

Or am I mis-remembering?

In any case, they currently find themselves embroiled in a Russian
propaganda-related scandal that has placed them in rather fetid company,
indeed.

Kremlin Troll ‘Alice Donovan’ Reportedly Writing News As Recently As October

By SAM THIELMAN <http://talkingpointsmemo.com/profile/samt> Published DECEMBER
26, 2017 4:58 PM

What did the Russian government-backed troll calling herself (or himself)
Alice Donovan want?

That byline appears in at least 10 different news outlets beginning in 2016
and continuing through October of this year. The FBI believes “Alice
Donovan” is the name of “a pseudonymous foot soldier in an army of
Kremlin-led trolls,” according to the Washington Post
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/kremlin-trolls-burned-across-the-internet-as-washington-debated-options/2017/12/23/e7b9dc92-e403-11e7-ab50-621fe0588340_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_infowars-250pm-1-duplicate%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.4a4fdabff9c0>.
She was also actively criticizing not just the Hillary Clinton campaign but
Trump-era foreign policy as recently as October.

“Donovan” appears to be the same person identified in one of Scott Shane’s
New York Times stories about Russian interference on Facebook
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/politics/russia-facebook-twitter-election.html?_r=1>:
An Alice Donovan outed by Facebook as a Russian intelligence sock puppet
approvingly posted links to Kremlin cutout site DCLeaks, particularly its
dump of documents related to George Soros’s Open Society Foundation.

The 13 publications that published Donovan’s emailed submissions were
Counterpunch, Veterans Today, We Are Change, MintPressNews, Global
Research, Global Politics, Ground Report, Op-Ed News, Restoring Liberty,
Activist Post, The Duran, Popular Resistance, and foreign language outlets
Reseau International and Naval Brasil. Most retread the news of the day
with what appears to be very little oversight; Counterpunch is both the
most traditional and the site with the clearest political perspective.

As a reporter, “Donovan” wrote blog posts that criticized Obama, Hillary
Clinton, and allies including Colin Powell—similar to the themes of
Russian-backed trolls masquerading as pro-Trump Americans on social media.

But a review of her articles—many of them plagiarized, according to one
publication that ran them
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/25/go-ask-alice-the-curious-case-of-alice-donovan-2>,
the venerable left-wing blog Counterpunch—reveals a number of other areas
of interest: Whereas Russian-controlled contributions to right-wing twitter
feeds and Facebook pages stoked racism and railed against gun control, the
ostensibly leftward prong of the massive Russian disinformation campaign
focused on US activity in Syria, Venezuela and Turkey.

Perhaps predictably, some of the sites that published Donovan’s work have
reacted largely with shrugs in much the same way that right-wing
organizations felt too much was made of pro-cop memes, anti-Hillary jokes,
and anti-immigrant sentiment. The origin of the articles was unimportant,
suggested both Veterans Today editor Gordon Duff and Counterpunch editors
Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank. “I don’t edit what people do. If it’s
original, I’ll publish it,” Duff told the Post. “I don’t decide what’s real
and not real.” Today Duff wrote his own conspiracy-filled piece
<https://www.veteranstoday.com/2017/12/26/do-we-burn-down-the-post/> about
the Post story, primarily to criticize Counterpunch, at Veterans Today.

Counterpunch took a more philosophical tack: “So why did we run five pieces
by Alice Donovan?” asked St. Clair and Frank. “First, because they were
interesting and timely. The short pieces on Syria, in particular, came at a
moment when Trump was engaged in his first big military action and we were
eager, perhaps too eager, to publish as many different perspectives as
possible on his new, more aggressive policy.”

Another site, We Are Change, didn’t respond to the accusations at all,
though it did remove Donovan’s work from its public web presence.

Donovan’s articles on US military presence in the Middle East are unusual.
In its mea-sorta-culpa, Counterpunch published a bibliography including as
much of Donovan’s work as its writers could find, identifying one post
lifted letter-for-letter from a pro-Russian, pro-Bashar al-Assad website
called Inside Syria Media Center
<https://en.insidesyriamc.com/2017/05/19/us-led-coalition-airstrike-on-assads-forces-was-not-accidental/>.
Another—also cross-posted, this time with a shady news site called “Ground
Report”—called the introduction of special forces troops into Mosul in
November 2016 “a large-scale PR-campaign to support the candidate of the
Democratic Party Hillary Clinton.”

Others are simply boilerplate anti-NATO, anti-Ukraine propaganda. Another
Ground Report piece pushes for the cessation of sanctions over its invasion
of Ukraine
<https://www.groundreport.com/will-trump-change-americas-policy-ukraine/>,
something the Russian government has pursued by every possible avenue.

But the feature of the Donovan articles that has provoked far less
discussion is that, for nearly a year after Trump’s election, they
mercilessly criticized him, as well, accusing his administration of
fomenting civil war in Venezuela, making note
<http://theduran.com/us-led-air-strikes-killed-record-number-civilians-syria/>
of
operations that really did cause tremendous innocent bloodshed in Syria
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-war-us-air-strikes-civilian-death-toll-deadliest-on-record-isis-donald-trump-a7751911.html>,
and stealing quotes and paragraphs from progressive publications including
The Guardian and The American Interest to do so.

In short, whoever handles the Donovan account seems to have kept his or her
eye on the ball: The goals of the Russian interference and influence
campaigns still appear to be a weakened NATO, a withdrawal of US forces
from Syria that leaves Moscow-friendly Assad in charge, and the end of
punitive sanctions for its invasion of Ukraine and the murder of Sergei
Magnitsky.

It may not actually matter to Moscow, or to “Alice Donovan” who is in
charge: There’s still Western power abroad, and whether because the Trump
administration still houses many Obama-era holdovers, because he has little
interest in changing the status quo, or because he genuinely wants to
maintain foreign policy continuity with his hated predecessor, the Kremlin
still hasn’t achieved its goals.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/kremlin-troll-alice-donovan-was-criticizing-us-foreign-policy-in-october
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