DIRTY WARS, DIRTY WARRIOR
Jessica Ashooh: The Taming of Reddit and the National Security State Plant
Tabbed to Do It
How and why did a hawkish young mandarin hothoused at elite universities and
in the halls of state power end up an executive at an anarchic messageboard
site with an anti-establishment reputation?
by Alan Macleod
June 11th, 2021
Mint Press News
By Alan Macleod
SAN FRANCISCO Reddit is one of the worlds most influential news and
social media platforms. The website attracted over 1.2 billion visits in
April 2021 alone, making it the United States eighth most visited site,
ahead of other leviathans like Twitter, Instagram and eBay. Now
majority-owned by a much larger corporate publishing empire, Reddit is also
far ahead of more established news sites, garnering three times the numbers
of Fox News and five times those of The New York Times.
That is why it was so surprising that so little was made of the companys
decision to appoint foreign policy hawk Jessica Ashooh to the position of
Director of Policy in 2017, at which time it was also the eight most visited
site in the U.S. Ashooh, who had been a Middle East foreign policy wonk at
NATOs think tank the Atlantic Council, was appointed at around the same
time that the Senate Select Intelligence Committee was demanding more
control over the popular website, on the grounds that it was being used to
spread disinformation. In her role as Director of Policy, she oversees all
government relations and public policy for the company, in addition to
managing content, product and advertising. Yet a Google search for Jessica
Ashooh Reddit filtered between late 2016 and early 2017 (after she was
appointed) elicits zero relevant results, meaning not one media outlet even
mentioned the questionable appointment.
This is all the more hair-raising, given her resume as a high state official
all of which raises serious questions about the extent of collaboration
between Silicon Valley and the national security state.
A hawks talons on Syria
The Atlantic Council is the de-facto brains of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization and takes funding from the military alliance, as well as from
the U.S. government, the U.S. military, Middle Eastern dictatorships, other
Western governments, big tech companies, and weapons manufacturers. Its
board of directors has been and continues to be a whos who of high U.S.
statespeople like Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, as
well as senior military commanders such as retired generals Wesley Clark,
David Petraeus, H.R. McMaster, James Mad Dog Mattis, the late Lt. Gen.
Brent Scowcroft, and Admiral James Stavridis. At least seven former CIA
directors are also on the board. As such, the council chooses to represent
both political wings of the national security state.
Jessica Ashooh Resume
Ashoohs LinkedIn resume epitomizes the troubling relantionship between
think tanks and big tech
Between 2015 and 2017, Ashooh was Deputy Director of the Atlantic Councils
Middle East Strategy Task Force, working directly with and under Madeline
Albright and Stephen Hadley. This is particularly noteworthy, given both
these individuals roles in the region. As Bill Clintons secretary of
state, Albright oversaw the Iraq sanctions and the Oil for Food Program,
denounced as genocide by the successive United Nations diplomats charged
with carrying them out. In an infamous interview with 60 Minutes, Albright
casually brushed off a question about her role in the killing of half a
million children, stating the price is worth it. Meanwhile, Hadley was
deputy or senior national security advisor to the government of George W.
Bush throughout the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, surely the greatest
crimes against humanity thus far in the 21st century.
Ashooh appears to be as hawkish as her bosses. Her particular area of
expertise is the war in Syria, regarding which she has been among the most
belligerent voices, constantly calling for more American intervention to
overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad. In a 2015 interview with Al
Jazeera, she praised the U.K. governments decision to bomb the country,
claiming that the British public was coming around to the idea of war. A
shocked interviewer asked how will the British airstrikes [on] Syria
make
the British public any safer? Ashooh replied that it was generally a
positive decision because it goes a long way in improving international
consensus on the way forward on Syria, although she lamented that there
wouldnt be much improvement in the situation without ground troops. There
will be no political solution without a military element, she predicted,
essentially making the pitch for war.
Ashooh has also constantly praised and supported Syrias opposition forces.
In 2016, she said that she was very happy that fighters on the ground from
a number of key factions were uniting against the Assad regime. She
condemned Russia for claiming these opposition forces were members of
terrorist groups like Al-Nusra, Jaysh al-Islam or ISIS, insisting that these
were moderate rebels.
Of course, the idea that there was still any measurable distance between
moderate rebels and outright militant jihadists by 2016 was hard to
maintain. Even The Washington Post by this time was admitting as much,
noting that so-called moderates were now so intermingled with al-Nusra
that it was difficult to tell them apart.
Nevertheless, the New Hampshire native took to the pages of The New York
Times to demand that the U.S. arm the opposition. Of course, it was already
doing so, the CIA spending $1 billion per year fielding rebel mercenary
armies in the conflict with one in every 15 dollars the agency spent going
to this endeavor. All of this Ashooh surely knew, yet she maintained that
the West must continue to jack up the price of Russia defending Assad. As
long as [Assad] remains in power and remains the figurehead of the Syrian
government
this conflict wont end, she said, laying out her
regime-change-or-bust position. Just weeks before unexpectedly taking over
at Reddit, Ashooh seemed to still be in full foreign-policy-hawk mode,
condemning Obama in the pages of The Washington Post for his apparent
softness on Syria and demanding that Trump restore U.S. credibility by
order[ing] targeted, punitive strikes against the Assad regime.
Jessica Ashooh
Ashooh attends British Polo Day at Abu Dhabis Ghantoot Racing and Polo
Club. Photo | Ahlan
Dirty war, dirty warrior
Ashooh is actually even more involved in the Syrian conflict than one might
realize from her hawkish opinions alone. Between 2011 and 2015, she worked
for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the United Arab Emirates, in her own
words, [p]rovid[ing] senior decision makers with policy analysis and
strategic advice, with a particular focus on Syria.
At that time the UAE was using its enormous financial clout to arm and fund
a myriad of jihadist groups attempting to overthow the secular strongman
Assad and establish some kind of Islamic state. Far from a conspiracy
theory, this comes straight from the horses mouth, as then-Vice President
Joe Biden revealed in a Q&A session in 2014. The future president frankly
stated:
The Saudis, the Emiratis, what were they doing?
They poured hundreds of
millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who
would fight against Assad, except that the people who were being supplied
were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from
other parts of the world.
Under pressure, he later apologized for his loose lips.
MintPress News asked the Emirati Ministry of Foreign Affairs to comment on
precisely what Ashoohs role was, but they failed to respond.
Jessica Ashooh Kurdistan
Ashooh is pictured during her time as a consultant in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Photo | Academyalumni
Ashooh herself appears to have been a relatively major player in the Syrian
Civil War. In her previously mentioned Washington Post article, she notes
that her boss was a former Emirati Air Force General and that she was flown
to Istanbul in 2013 to attend an emergency meeting with leaders of the
Syrian opposition, as well as ambassadors from unnamed Arab and Western
states, in order to plan a response to a reported chemical weapons attack
and to help the U.S. coordinate with the Syrian opposition.
At the same time as she was advising the nation on Middle Eastern affairs,
the UAE was widely accused of flying ISIS and al-Qaeda leaders into Yemen to
help them intensify the Saudi-led onslaught on the impoverished nation and
of smuggling U.S.-made weaponry including small arms, TOW missiles and
Oshkosh fighting vehicles to the jihadist groups. While Ashoohs writing
is careful to maintain a distinction between the moderate rebels she
supports and the fundamentalist radicals she does not, it certainly is
noteworthy that the entities she worked for consistently seem to end up in
league with the most regressive forces in the region. MintPress also reached
out to Reddit for comment on why they appointed Ashooh, given her past
history, and on the wider phenomenon of government penetration of social
media. The company initially promised to issue a response to the inquiry but
has not followed through with it.
An Unholy Alliance: Did the US-Backed UAE Fly ISIS Leaders into Yemen's
Killing Fields?
The US-allied United Arab Emirates (UAE stands accused of flying ISIS
leaders from Syria into Yemen to use in the Saudi-led Coalition war.
MintPress News|Alexander Rubinstein|Mar 6, 2019
Opposing some dictatorships, supporting others
Regime change is on the table for more than just one Middle Eastern nation.
In a 2017 paper for the Center for the National Interest a think tank
established by former Republican President Richard Nixon and the Godfather
of Neoconservatism, Irving Kristol Ashooh explores the different options
for forcing regime change in Iran, but concludes that overthrowing the
odious regime is an impossible task right now, and criticizes the idea as
a quixotic dream.
Nevertheless, she is far from an Iran dove. An Atlantic Council report she
co-wrote insists that Iranian interference in the Arab world must be
deterred, and that Americas friends and partners must be reassured that
the U.S. opposes Iranian hegemony and will work with them to prevent it.
Ashoohs commitment to fighting against Middle Eastern dictatorships might
seem more principled if she did not appear so enamored of the least
democratic one of them all. In 2016, she accompanied Albright and Hadley to
Saudi Arabia and praised the monarchys dynamic leadership on the economy
and its nurturing of a new generation. It was really really exciting to see
that level of energy and the level of government support for these young
people who were interested in shaping their own futures
it was just
wonderful, she said. In an article about her experience for business news
website Market Watch, she waxed lyrical about how forward-thinking the Saudi
government is and how the country has become a hub for the dynamic and
positive change that is swelling up throughout the region. Presumably, this
excludes Yemen, a nation they were bombing relentlessly. In a 2020
interview, Ashooh revealed that her dream job would be U.S. Ambassador to
Saudi Arabia. One of her earliest comments on her public Reddit page (made
before she began working there) is deflecting the Kingdom from criticism of
its dreadful treatment of women.
Jessica Ashooh Reddit profile
Ashoohs Reddit account, which doesnt identify her real identity, uses the
moniker, arabscarab
As part of the Atlantic Council, Ashooh was tasked with envisaging a new
Middle East for the 21st century. Given her output, it seems that she
advocates for a transition towards a more privatized, free-market economic
setup, not completely unlike the shock therapy tried in Latin America in the
1970s and 1980s. We have to encourage states to make the reforms that move
economies from state-based to ones that support entrepreneurship, because
the age of state-based economies is over, she said at a talk at New York
University in 2015, adding:
Youve got to move to support entrepreneurship in the region and let people
take advantage of the natural industrial tendencies of people in the Middle
East. My God, if youve ever been to a Turkish bazaar or a market in Cairo
you know that these countries are perfectly capable of having functioning
market economies. But the state has gotten in the way.
Ashoohs LinkedIn profile also notes that in 2010, she worked as an advisor
to the Iraqi Ministry of Planning on a variety of strategic and economic
development issues, but does not go into any more detail about what those
issues were. A further biography merely states that her consultancy agency
provid[ed] strategic and management consulting services to the Ministry of
Planning of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Northern Iraq.
Unsurprisingly, the organization has links to the U.S. military; the
agencys lead partner being a former Army captain.
Think Tankie
Ashooh comes from a relatively prominent New Hampshire family of Lebanese
descent, the most notable of which is probably her uncle Richard. Richard
Ashooh was Donald Trumps Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export
Administration and a former executive at weapons manufacturer BAE Systems.
Unlike her uncle, Jessica appears to lean more Democratic, having donated
money to a number of local politicians, as well as to anti-Trump Republican
groups aimed at convincing them to vote blue, such as Right Side PAC and the
now infamous Lincoln Project. However, she also appears to have great
respect for many Republicans, having written her doctoral thesis at Oxford
University on the Middle East policy of the George W. Bush administration.
She also stated that the person she would have most liked to have met was
41st President George Bush Senior, describing him as possessing incredible
amounts of strategy, finesse and restraint. Thus, her political views
appear to be exactly in the center of the neoliberal blob in Washington.
Ashooh also worked for the right-wing think tank the CATO Institute and is a
Term Member of the more Democratic-aligned Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR). The CFRs term member program is intended to, in its own words,
cultivate the next generation of foreign policy leaders.
Surveillance Valley
How and why, then, did a hawkish young mandarin hothoused at elite
universities and in the halls of state power end up an executive at an
anarchic messageboard site with an anti-establishment reputation? Virtually
everyone else in senior roles at Reddit has relevant backgrounds in
marketing or tech, having worked with comparable companies such as Yelp,
Expedia and Snapchat.
Tom Secker a journalist, podcaster and researcher who runs SpyCulture.com,
an online archive about government involvement in the entertainment industry
was deeply skeptical. That someone whose entire career has been in
international relations and foreign affairs is now the senior policy wonk at
Reddit is simply bizarre. Given her ties to the CFR, Atlantic Council and
the like, its downright suspicious, Secker told MintPress.
Underneath the surface, however, the Atlantic Council has been rapidly
expanding its influence and control over big social media companies. In
2018, it announced that it would be partnering with Facebook to promote
trustworthy sources and derank, demote and even delete low quality or fake
news, thus effectively curating what the platforms 2.85 billion worldwide
users see in their news feeds. But the effect of recent algorithmic changes
has been to throttle alternative media traffic in favor of establishment
sources such as CNN, Fox News and The New York Times. Even such more
mainstream liberal sites as Mother Jones have seen their numbers crater.
Facebook later admitted that they were directly targeting Mother Jones
because of its left-leaning content, raising the question that if such a
middle-of-the-road liberal outlet was being penalized, wasnt the collapse
in traffic to more radical publications surely deliberate? Given the
Atlantic Councils funding and the identities of those on its board, their
control over social media is tantamount to state censorship on a global
level.
Earlier this year, Facebook also hired NATO press officer Ben Nimmo to be
its intelligence chief, in another move that dismayed free-speech advocates.
In the past, Nimmo has identified a Welsh pensioner and an internationally
known Ukranian pianist as Russian bots, raising more questions about the
suitability of the Atlantic Council to be an arbiter of truth online.
The Facebook-Atlantic Council link mirrors that of Microsoft with NewsGuard,
a new piece of software purportedly trying to fight fake news by placing
either green shields or red warning logos, corresponding to an outlets
credibility, beside all links in its browser, Microsoft Edge this
credibility being decided entirely by NewsGuard itself. Newsguard pushed
Microsoft to install the software on all its products as standard. Again,
however, NewsGuards system rated establishment websites like Fox News and
CNN as trustworthy but independent media as suspect. And again, a glance at
its advisory board makes it clear that this is a state operation. Those in
key positions included George W. Bushs Secretary of Homeland Security and
former NSA and CIA Director General Michael Hayden; ex-White House
Communications Director Don Baer; and former Secretary General of NATO
Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Worse still, NewsGuard is also linked to a PR agency
employed in whitewashing the Saudi governments human-rights record and its
role in the carnage in Yemen.
Twitter, too, has some extremely troubling links with state power. In 2019
Gordon MacMillan, a senior Twitter executive responsible for the Middle East
region, was outed as an active duty officer in the British Armys 77th
Brigade, a unit dedicated to online operations and psychological warfare.
Far from causing a scandal, only one major U.S. outlet even mentioned the
story, and the journalist in question resigned from the profession weeks
later, claiming the existence of a network of top-down state censors who
quash stories that threaten the power and prestige of the national security
state. To this day, MacMillan remains in his post at Twitter, strongly
suggesting the social media company knew of his role before he was hired.
Over the past few years, Twitter, Reddit and Facebook have announced the
deletion of hundreds of thousands of accounts linked to sources in Russia,
Iran, China and other enemy states, often on the recommendation of Western
governments or state-sponsored intelligence organizations. However, they
never seem willing or able to find any manipulation of their platforms by
Western governments. Thus, the upshot of this has been to slowly dissuade
critics of Western foreign policy from using their services.
The mainstream media-politik establishment has managed to get a hold over
Twitter, Facebook and Instagram shadow-banning and downrating posts
considered Russian propaganda or whatever other excuse they use to
marginalize perspectives and content outside of the mainstream, Secker told
MintPress. Audiences for this sort of content are increasingly pissed off
and alienated by the major social media sites.
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Increasingly, unwelcome political voices are either brushed off by centrist
pundits as repeating Russian talking points or smeared as being amplified by
Kremlin-based bot farms. The popularity of movements on the left like Black
Lives Matter or the Bernie Sanders campaign were written off as partially
linked to Russia, while others suggested that the January 6 insurrection in
Washington was essentially a Russian operation.
The irony is that many of the wildest accusations against Putin that have
fed this climate of suspicion began life in Atlantic Council documents. For
example, the organization has published a series of studies that suggest
that virtually every European political party challenging the neoliberal
status quo in some way from Labour and UKIP in the U.K. to Syriza and
Golden Dawn in Greece and PODEMOS and Vox in Spain are secretly controlled
by Russia, functioning as the Kremlins Trojan Horses, in its words.
The Atlantic Council is also deeply intertwined with a U.K.
government-funded organization called the Integrity Initiative, something
that purports to be a group defending democracy from disinformation.
However, in practice, it appears to be doing the opposite: planting
disinformation about politicians supposed links to Russia in order to
undermine them. The Integrity Initiative is a government-backed cluster of
journalists who operate in unison to conduct propaganda blitzes on
unsuspecting publics. In 2018, it launched a successful operation to prevent
Colonel Pedro Baños being appointed Spains head of national security.
Considering Baños too soft on Russia for the Atlantic Council and other
hawks liking, the initiative sprung into action, creating a storm of
protest that led to another individual being chosen.
New Documents Reveal Covert UK Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling
In US Politics
With the help of John Rendon and the State Department's Global Engagement
Center, the Integrity Initiative brings its disinformation campaign to the
US.
MintPress News|Mark Ames|Jan 9, 2019
Reddit actually played a key role in a 2019 propaganda blitz against
anti-war Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. A few days before the U.K.s general
election, Corbyn promoted documents leaked on the platform that showed that
Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson was negotiating with American
companies, putting much of the countrys National Health Service up for
sale. With just days to go before polls opened, it could have proved a game
changer. Reddit quickly came to Johnsons rescue, however, asserting that
the documents were part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The story in
the pliant British press switched from Boris Johnson is selling off the
NHS to Corbyn promotes Russian disinfo, thus greasing the skids for an
easy victory for the hardline anti-Russia Conservative Party, an outcome the
hawks at the Atlantic Council were no doubt relieved by, given Corbyns open
skepticism about war, empire and nuclear weapons. The veracity of the
documents was not challenged.
For a while
Founded in 2005, Reddit has grown to become one of the worlds largest and
most influential websites. However, it began life as an anarchistic
messageboard whose culture was profoundly libertarian and
anti-establishment. For years, the companys administrators took a near free
speech absolutist position. Aaron Swartz, Reddits co-founder, was an open
source hacktivist and even attempted to download and publish the entirety of
academic publisher Jstors library. When authorities got wind of what he was
doing, they threatened him with 40 years in prison, an action that caused
him to take his own life in 2013.
Reddits own position on free information and free speech was often so
extreme it caused huge controversy. The site became the internets largest
source of child pornography. It was only after CNN began reporting on it to
a nationwide audience that things began to change. Other, grossly offensive
communities like /r/BeatingWomen and /r/CoonTown were also protected.
Nevertheless, the culture established by anarchistic tech bros remained for
some years, with the site resembling darker corners of the internet like
4Chan and 8Chan as much as more family-friendly mainstream social media like
Facebook.
Ashoohs arrival in 2017 coincided with a new era in the sites history.
Gone were the days of protecting communities that would bring in bad
publicity. Her team quickly brought in a new content policy and began to
delete communities that violated it. Last year, she oversaw the banning of
over 2,000 communities in a single day, including /r/The_Donald, the main
Donald Trump subreddit, and /r/ChapoTrapHouse, the most active left-wing
community. These decisions have helped the money flow in; since 2017 revenue
has more than tripled.
However, what has been lost across the internet is the liberatory potential
of these technologies. In the 1990s and 2000s, many predicted that the
internet would usher in a new era of egalitarianism and genuine democracy,
helping even to reduce barriers and tensions between nations. For a while,
the new medium allowed political actors to challenge the status quo and gain
huge followings quickly. Alternative media was easily outperforming legacy
media, and challenging the status quo when it came to news. Seeing that, the
reaction since 2016 has been swift, as the elite have moved to retighten
their grip over the means of communication. Ashoohs jump from national
security state official to Reddit Director of Policy is just one more point
of reference on that chart.