So You've Decided to Abandon Critical Thinking

Or, does Justin Ling know why 'military intelligence' is an oxymoron?

No need for any tangential digression introduction to this piece, it’s a direct response to Justin Ling’s peculiar October 29th post, wherein he comments on former Conservative MP Chris Alexander’s extraordinary claims made against Ottawa Citizen reporter David Pugliese.

If you are unfamiliar with what transpired, you can read this Canadian Press primer.

And click here to see the raw video of the October 24th Public Safety and National Security meeting where Alexander claimed, under the full protection of parliamentary immunity, and without providing any real evidence, that Pugliese has been a Russian intelligence asset for decades.

My response combs through the section of Ling’s article that focuses on David Pugliese, so you may want to read his first before diving into this blistering and unforgiving line by line dissection. 

To begin with, if Justin Ling is not a fan of journalists testifying before parliamentary or congressional committees, then he should lead by example and not do it. His concern as a journalist, however, should first and foremost be the sanctity of his own independence and objectivity, not whether his testimony would be dragged into any kind of partisan squabbling. 

If your work speaks for itself, let it. Journalists are supposed to be grilling the politicians asking the questions as much as the witnesses and scrutinizing the topic at hand.

With too few exceptions, politicians are idiots, and we all know the old saying about idiots: they’ll drag you down to their level then beat you with experience. That those present at the committee meeting seemed more interested in the potential virality of their reactions than scrutinizing Chris Alexander’s implausible claims certainly proves that point as much as it undermines what little faith I have in their ability to analyse and assess matters of national security and public safety.

I don’t know what Justin Ling thought he would get out of his testimony in committee, but if he thought it would be any kind of arena for high-minded intelligent discussion, he might not be the Ottawa insider he takes himself to be.

Ling talks about his jaw hitting the floor after Alexander made his extraordinary and rather difficult to believe allegations against David Pugliese. What I wonder is why he wasn’t thinking of what questions to ask.

Parliamentary formalities be damned Justin, you’re a journalist, you were there, why not ask questions? You literally had one job.

Speaking of journalists, if you’ve never heard of Stevie Cameron, go out and buy her book On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years. I would advise Justin Ling to read it as much as anyone else interested in Canadian politics, or the art of journalism. That aside, I bring up Stevie Cameron because she too was alleged to be an RCMP informant for many years, just as David Pugliese is alleged to have been a Soviet and Russian intelligence asset. 

Journalists know allegations require proof, not mere longevity, to be confirmed.

Stevie Cameron was ultimately vindicated and there are some remarkable parallels between her situation and that of David Pugliese. Namely, in Cameron’s case, the RCMP incorrectly listed her as a confidential informant on an internal document after Cameron had pointed an RCMP officer towards already published information when they asked for help with an investigation. The allegation she was an informant was whipped up into a frenzy by boosters of former prime minister Brian Mulroney, who was upset with Cameron’s consistently critical reporting on the various scandals of his government (including Airbus, for which Cameron, once again, was ultimately vindicated—Mulroney did indeed receive cash payments from Karlheinz Schreiber). 

In sum, a baseless allegation made on false information was turned into a smear campaign by powerful people to silence one of their critics. It’s a story as old as time.

And Justin Ling should know this. A journalist’s job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, not serve the powerful nor the power establishment in a given society.

Ling should be asking himself who is so consistently making these allegations, and where they are coming from.

Is it the same small group of Eastern European diaspora ultranationalists who don’t want journalists poking around in the wartime records of their grandfathers? Is it the membership of foreign-funded ‘libertarian’ think tanks who actively engage in historical revisionism to suit contemporary geopolitical narratives? Is it talking heads with no background in national security, history, or geo-politics, yet who present themselves as experts in all these domains? Is it people on the payroll of latter-day NATO allies’ defense ministries? Is it a former cabinet minister, a cheerleader for the national embarrassment that is the Victims of Communism memorial, who bungled more than a few of his government portfolios?

The Occam’s Razor approach dictates a journalist first consider the axes the accuser may wish to grind, particularly if the accuser refuses to make the allegation in public, where he might be subject to a defamation suit.

The allegations against David Pugliese fall apart very quickly when you realize that the documents—if they are in fact real—don’t say anything more than that the KGB may have at one point considered Pugliese a possible asset worth contacting. Ling himself ultimately concedes this point in his article, but not without a lot of ‘guilt by association’ preamble. But that too falls apart.

If a journalist reports something Russia—or any other country, entity, organization (etc) for that matter—then uses for self-serving propaganda purposes, this is only proof of a coincidence, not a conspiracy.

If Ottawa is making decisions Moscow can exploit for their own ends, this may be evidence Ottawa might not be making the best decisions. That there is a well-documented Nazi problem within the Ukrainian armed forces, that the veneration of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators and alleged war criminals is a growing problem within Ukraine (to say nothing of causing problems between NATO allies), and that Canada and NATO’s strategy regarding Ukraine does not appear to be working are all issues we have to deal with. What Russia uses for their propaganda purposes ought to be of secondary concern to what are evidently far greater and more immediate problems. 

It is a profound indictment of our own lack of seriousness as a nation that we would be more worried about Russia using verifiable, authentic, and truthful reporting for their propaganda, rather than what that reporting actually says about our government’s policies.

The historical record is not a Russian disinformation campaign (no matter what Chrystia Freeland says).

In addition, any intelligence provided by a foreign government should be thoroughly scrutinized by our own intelligence services. Ling’s apparent insinuation that intel furnished by Kyiv is somehow beyond reproach is exceptionally naive for any journalist, let alone one who claims a specialization in national security and intelligence matters. Even a cursory examination of post-Soviet Ukrainian history provides plenty of justification to take intelligence they provide with a grain of salt. 

And let me be perfectly clear: Vladimir Putin is a war criminal, and the people of Ukraine should be free from Russian aggression and domination. I want this war to end, so that no more Ukrainian lives are lost. My personal position is very different from that of Canada or NATO, both of which appear to want this war to continue until the last Ukrainian. All of this can be true while also being highly critical of Ukraine’s actions, policies, and the ultranationalist interpreters of their history. 

I find it very peculiar that Justin Ling didn’t mention that two Ukrainian archives, contacted by Global News reporters, found no documents relating to David Pugliese. That’s a pretty important piece of information to omit entirely from his analysis.

Ling says we need to “get serious” about Kremlin influence operations, but there is little verifiable evidence the Kremlin is running any kind of genuine influence operation. Ever since Hillary Clinton blamed her 2016 presidential loss on Putin, rather than her own ineptitude, seemingly every mainstream newsmedia organization has accepted the ‘Russian foreign interference’ narrative without critical assessment or scrutiny.

Don’t ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence, but also remember that simply repeating the lie doesn’t make it any more true. Seemingly all political parties are now blaming their failures on foreign interference. Where and when does it end? (and do we not see the problem inherent with the political class telling us all we’re too stupid to understand the news and too gullible to handle democracy?)

The idea that Russia is hard at work trying to influence policy, politics, or politicians in Canada probably says much more about our own inflated sense of self-importance than anything else. What could they possibly hope to achieve? Stopping us from sending Ukraine WW2-era handguns?

Ling’s anecdotal counter-arguments are peculiar to say the least. Consider his story about meeting two Department of National Defense staffers (at the behest of a senior defense official no less), who asked him—apparently unprompted—if he thought Pugliese was a Russian intel asset.

Had I been in Ling’s shoes I would assume DND was trying to influence me.

Incidentally, this reminds me of the old joke: ‘military intelligence’ is an excellent example of an oxymoron.

Credit where it’s due, Justin Ling doesn’t exactly accuse David Pugliese of being a Soviet or Russian intelligence asset. But he does seem to relish using the term useful idiot, and appears to place a lot of emphasis on what he evidently believes to be damning circumstantial evidence. 

Ling seems to believe that Pugliese somehow transformed himself from a beat reporter into Canada’s premier critic of the DND. I would counter that all good reporters need to critically assess everything they hear, read, and witness, and that anything less isn’t journalism but public relations.

Everything that David Pugliese has reported on, irrespective of whether it aligns with Russian talking points, is true and accurate. This should give us considerable reason to pause and assess just what exactly our government is doing with regards to Ukraine, as much as DND procurement policies, their track record of sweeping sexual assault claims under the rug, the disaster that is the F-35 project, the National Shipbuilding Strategy, the Victims of Communism memorial, or anything else for which Pugliese’s reporting is beyond reproach. 

Put it another way, if we’re supposed to stop reporting on things that make the government look bad, because this could potentially be useful to other countries’ propaganda efforts, then we may as well hammer the last nail in the fourth estate’s coffin, because journalism as the bedrock of democracy would cease to exist. 

If we can’t handle the truth because other nations may exploit it, we are infants, not citizens.

It should be noted as well that, by Chris Alexander’s logic, Justin Ling may be a Russian intelligence asset, given how often the Russian Embassy (by Ling’s own account, no less) pushes stories on him. Worth noting as well that there is no evidence whatsoever that any Soviet or Russian agent ever pushed a story to Pugliese. 

(And just for the record, despite my own track record writing critically of the Canadian government, of Chrystia Freeland’s ties to Ukrainian ultranationalists, of the Victims of Communism memorial, or of the Yaroslav Hunka scandal, the Russian Embassy hasn’t reach out to me yet. Perhaps it’s because I’m not that useful an idiot…)

To Ling’s circumstantial evidence against Pugliese, some critical pushback:

1. There are plenty of valid reasons to not disclose a source, and these reasons do not necessarily mean the journalist is in any way compromised.

2. Irrespective of whether Russia was shopping the Chomiak story around, the fact remains Chrystia Freeland wrote about her maternal grandfather’s history editing a Nazi newspaper in an academic paper published in 1996. Her uncle, the eminent historian John-Paul Himka, wrote about Chomiak in 1998. This is 20 years before both Pugliese and Robert Fife wrote about Freeland’s knowledge of Chomiak in 2017. The problem, once again, isn’t what Russia chooses to exploit for propaganda purposes, but rather the far greater issue that Canada’s deputy PM and finance minister has bent over backwards to whitewash her grandfather’s complicity in the Holocaust (something well-documented by historians and not up for debate). At any time Freeland could have simply said “what my grandfather did shames me and my family, but I am not responsible for his actions” and that would have been the end of it. Freeland and Freeland alone is responsible for making this a bigger issue than it needed to be, but her actions certainly raise serious questions about her own judgement, not to mention who official Canada thinks is responsible for the Holocaust.

A close inspection of the documents Chris Alexander claims as a smoking gun reveals absolutely nothing. His allegation that David Pugliese is a foreign intelligence asset is baseless, and there’s ample proof of this in that Chris Alexander will not make the claim publicly, for fear of the defamation suit he would doubtless lose.

A far likelier story is that David Pugliese’s invaluable critical reporting has embarrassed powerful people who thought they could create a scandal, enlist uncritical reporters to amplify the baseless allegation, and create enough momentum to force Postmedia to fire Pugliese. So far they have failed, but take note of the talking heads in the think tank community that have been cheering this on. They are not friends of democracy, they are the enemy within.

As for Ling, I don’t know why I expected so much more from him.

I am exceedingly disappointed.