The Truth About Today’s Anarchists

Mr. Quinn began studying footage of looting from around the country and saw the same black outfits and, in some cases, the same masks. He decided to go to a protest dressed like that himself, to figure out what was really going on. He expected to find white supremacists who wanted to help re-elect President Trump by stoking fear of Black people. What he discovered instead were true believers in “insurrectionary anarchism.”

To better understand them, Mr. Quinn, a 40-something theater student who worked at Univision until the pandemic, has spent the past four months marching with “black bloc” anarchists in half a dozen cities across the country, chronicling the experience on his website, Public Report.

Mr. Quinn discovered a thorny truth about the mayhem that unfolded in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis. It wasn’t mayhem at all.

While talking heads on television routinely described it as a spontaneous eruption of anger at racial injustice, it was strategically planned, facilitated and advertised on social media by anarchists who believed that their actions advanced the cause of racial justice. In some cities, they were a fringe element, quickly expelled by peaceful organizers. But in Washington, Portland and Seattle they have attracted a “cultlike energy,” Mr. Quinn told me.

Don’t take just Mr. Quinn’s word for it. Take the word of the anarchists themselves, who lay out the strategy in Crimethinc, an anarchist publication: Black-clad figures break windows, set fires, vandalize police cars, then melt back into the crowd of peaceful protesters. When the police respond by brutalizing innocent demonstrators with tear gas, rubber bullets and rough arrests, the public’s disdain for law enforcement grows. It’s Asymmetric Warfare 101.

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An anarchist podcast called “The Ex-Worker” explains that while some anarchists believe in pacifist civil disobedience inspired by Mohandas Gandhi, others advocate using crimes like arson and shoplifting to wear down the capitalist system. According to “The Ex-Worker,” the term “insurrectionary anarchist” dates back at least to the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, when opponents of the fascist leader Francisco Franco took “direct action” against his regime, including assassinating policemen and robbing banks.

If that is not enough to convince you that there’s a method to the madness, check out the new report by Rutgers researchers that documents the “systematic, online mobilization of violence that was planned, coordinated (in real time) and celebrated by explicitly violent anarcho-socialist networks that rode on the coattails of peaceful protest,” according to its co-author Pamela Paresky. She said some anarchist social media accounts had grown 300-fold since May, to hundreds of thousands of followers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/opinion/anarchists-protests-black-lives-matter.html

https://www.publicreport.org/

Brennan Rebuffed Requests to Lower Confidence in Key Russia Finding

The former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan disagreed with the recommendation of two senior officers in early 2017 who wanted to override intelligence analysts’ determination that the agency had high confidence in one of its major judgments in the assessment of Russia’s 2016 election interference: that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia tried to help Donald J. Trump by discrediting Hillary Clinton.

The revelation by Mr. Brennan in his new book, “Undaunted,” will probably fuel additional Republican criticism of the intelligence agencies’ findings. But Mr. Brennan defended his actions, saying he was affirming the determinations of the analysts steeped most deeply in the intelligence, not intervening for political reasons.

“I didn’t change a single analytic judgment in that intelligence community assessment,” Mr. Brennan said in an interview that is set to be broadcast on C-SPAN’s “Book TV” in the coming days.

The declassified assessment, released in January 2017 during the closing days of the Obama administration, said that while the C.I.A. and F.B.I. had high confidence in the finding about Mr. Putin, the National Security Agency had moderate confidence, a lower level.

Mr. Brennan said the National Security Agency originally had high confidence in the conclusion but that Adm. Michael S. Rogers, its director at the time, reduced the confidence level. Mr. Brennan said Admiral Rogers had concerns about the confidence level stemming from the quantity of sources, but Mr. Brennan said the quality of the sources justified the high confidence. Admiral Rogers, now retired, has declined to discuss the deliberations.

While the finding about Mr. Putin’s efforts to help Mr. Trump’s election chances has been affirmed by a bipartisan Senate report and by the former C.I.A. director Mike Pompeo, now the secretary of state, President Trump’s allies disparage it and have sought to undermine it by pointing to the agencies’ differing confidence levels. John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence who was previously one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters in Congress, has said that Mr. Putin was merely trying to undermine American democracy and sow chaos, rather than supporting Mr. Trump’s election.

All three agencies had high confidence in the conclusion that Mr. Putin developed a clear preference for Mr. Trump.

In addition to writing about the debate over the confidence level of the other finding in his book, scheduled to be released next week, Mr. Brennan has also answered questions about the intelligence assessment posed by John H. Durham, the U.S. attorney assigned by the Justice Department to review the intelligence agencies’ examination of the Russian interference campaign in 2016.

Mr. Brennan said that after a team of more than a dozen agency analysts made its initial draft assessment, two more senior officers in the mission center that oversaw intelligence on Russia expressed concerns to him. The two officers, one an analyst and the other with a background in operations, suggested the confidence level be reduced to moderate.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/us/politics/brennan-russia-election-interference.html