Book review of We Are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins

This is an interesting account of the fight against what the author calls the “Counterfactual Community”, which includes but is not limited to the Russian FSB and assorted multi-national internet extremists. I came to this book having known pretty much what the author, as the blogger “Brown Moses” had been up to regarding Syria a few years ago, and that “Bellingcat”, the offspring of his blog, had tracked down those responsible for the Salisbury Poisonings when the police and MI5 had not (or at least, not so far as we know). Precisely because Bellingcat uses open source information, it is able to publish its successes when traditional national intelligence agencies have to keep quiet or lose their secret sources

The author describes not only the basic open source investigative methods he invented for the Brown Moses blog, but also how these have evolved, through the Bellingcat years, to meet threats, needs and opportunities alike. It is interesting to see how he keeps ahead of the counter-factual community as their own methods change, not necessarily in the directions of either enlightenment or sophistication, but towards a sort of amplified assumed ignorance which they impiously hope will prove contagious. The author sees this as a tendency to deliberately confuse issues rather than explain them and to pretend that there is no such thing as truth. He also sees this is a trait which some people have, rather than a policy that someone invented. In my own view, if anyone in modern times invented the “post-truth world” it was Vladislav Surkov, who is notable amongst those involved in Vladimir Putin’s rise to power by virtue of the fact that he is still alive and he is, if anything, more influential than he once was (everyone else has been sidelined or has had a heart attack). Imagine, if you will, a version of Alistair Campbell who gets his way by throwing thinking fits rather than shouting blood-curdling threats down the phone at editors and ministers alike. The author makes no mention of Surkov and clearly has never investigated him, but should he choose to do so, he might be able to cast even more light into dark corners than he has done already. But the post-truth world is not just a modern invention: “what is truth?” was a popular way to justify falsehood and injustice in the Roman world and we have Pontius Pilate as an example of where treating truth as an illusion will get you.

The author is not a fan of Wikileaks and Julian Assange. The Wikileaks methodology is described as leaking such a huge mass of data at once that it is impossible to verify it all. (Even assuming it is all true, the weapon of the righteous is the sword of truth, not truth’s cluster bomb.) The author does not really explain his reservations about Wikileaks as clearly as he might, certainly not at any length, so here’s my understanding of what he means:

A great mass of largely incomprehensible facts are assembled, in the knowledge that what the mainstream media will do upon their release is to use search engines and other software tools of varying degrees of sophistication to quickly cherry-pick all the “relevant” (in other words: “juicy”) bits. All the malign actor needs is a grudge against someone (Hillary Clinton, in Assange’s case) and they can sow their gigabyte or so of factual but largely incomprehensible data with some really nice-looking cherries, which the journalist’s predictable cherry-picking search terms will be sure to find. But because the data as a whole is so indigestible, the verification process has already been abandoned because the carefully-timed release of the huge mass of data has put competitive journalists under pressure of time as they seek to be first to find the best cherries and publish them. So mostly or even completely true facts, in sufficient concentration, can become a “Weapon of Mass Disinformation.” And Ms Clinton’s reputation has been trashed. Or anybody else’s reputation, on the left, right or even the extreme centre represented by Tony Blair and Immanuel Macron. I do not perceive Ms Clinton to be a martyred innocent, but suggestively shaving some truths to the bone and letting journalists discover them, as if by their own efforts, in the middle of a pile of factual irrelevance is a tool which could convict anyone of anything. The ultimate injustice is to harness truth to evil ends

The author does not mention the ICIJ, but I’d regard them with some of the same reservations he clearly has about Wikileaks, because they also tend to gleefully pack their truth into cluster bombs.

And although, from the very beginning of his investigative career Eliot Higgins has battled the FSB (which takes considerable courage), the need now is for someone to take the fight to China’s 610 office and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. The FSB is only committing murder, after all, whilst the 610 Office and the XPCC are doing worse than that. They are not working together to commit genocide, so much as working independently to each eliminate a completely separate victim community. The FSB seeks to pick a fight and then win it, which is how Mr Higgins comes to be fighting them (and, touch wood, winning). The 610 Office and the XPCC are currently having their way without any fight at all. 

 

We Are Bellingcat is published by Bloomsbury, on the 4^th of February 2021