Military Preps for Civil Unrest Around Election

Nothing to see here, “fact checkers” say

U.S. troops assigned to the 1st Battalion, 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment conduct an exercise simulating election-related violence in the DC area (September 9) | Defense Department photo

We’ve been fact checked. 

Our posting of news last week on @KlipNewsorg that the Army was rehearsing for potential civil unrest and violence around the presidential-election earned a “community note” on Twitter this week, one that was both wrong and ominous at the same time.

After posting about the “Ambitious Guardian” military exercise to our KlipNews Twitter account, we were brought to task for — God forbid —not accepting the Army’s framing of the story.

The episode is interesting because it shows how easily fact checking can veer into soft censorship.

Screenshot of the “community note” appended to our tweet

Shortly after our post began circulating widely, Elias Atienza, an editor and self-described “fact man” for the Check Your Fact organization, took issue. Saying we were wrong in our reporting because “it’s an annual exercise,” Atienza linked to an Army press release (from last year), essentially saying very little about the purpose of the exercise or the context under which it was being held. Atienza was wrong about the exercise, wrong about the scenario, and just wrong.

It would be like saying that news about killing civilians in Gaza isn’t news because they were also killed yesterday. And that the Israelis say they didn’t, so it didn’t happen. Pretty soon, there’s no news, which I guess is what the government wants (unless it says what’s news).

Let’s go through it: Even the Army’s official release describing Ambitious Guardian said that the exercise was intended to realistically test the military’s ability to operate “during National Security Special Events” in the Washington, DC area. National Security Special Events are the highest-level declarations of the need for security available to the U.S. government and only the president or the Secretary of Homeland Security have the authority to issue them. In other words, while not saying it explicitly, the Army is saying it is to prepare for various scenarios, from a major terrorist attack to civil unrest and violence.

To further bolster our reporting, last week, the Secret Service announced that for the first time ever, the upcoming election certification on January 6 was being designated a National Security Special Event, as I wrote about yesterday. What Fact Man did not seem to realize is that Ambitious Guardian is focused on National Security Special Events, the nature of those NSSEs changing each year. This time, given the obvious concerns over the chaos of the last election, this NSSE is focused on January 6, in other words, civil unrest, rioting, an assault on Washington, insurrection, you name it.

Knowing none of the actual facts, Fact Man simply looked up Ambitious Guardian, saw it takes place each year, and decided that this news of government preparations is a nothingburger. 

I don’t fault Fact Man for not knowing that the upcoming NSSE is about preventing a January 6 repeat. National security is complicated and the secrecy makes it difficult to learn about these things (which is why we do what we do in the first place, and why we hope you’ll subscribe to support this project).

It is true that at no point did the military explain in plain English that it was preparing for election-related unrest, instead alluding only to “NSSEs” in the “NCR” [national capital region] and other opaque jargon. But fact checking engenders the mindset of a traffic cop, issuing citations to people for not having a clean car. In a sense our tweet was speeding because we didn’t bother to hand-hold and explain to the reader that the upcoming NSSE was election-related and so of course the military exercise was focused on that. We didn’t explain that this is what Ambitious Guardian exercises are about. We didn’t explain that the units involved are explicitly tasked with protecting the president. We didn’t explain the dozens of other pieces of evidence that the military, homeland security, law enforcement and the intelligence community are all spooked about potential violence this year.

A conviction I have is that journalism should tell ordinary people what’s going on, without the confusing terminology that Officer Fact Man demands in order to not get pulled over. Do you have any idea how fast you were going in that tweet? 

And it’s not just him. Countless ordinary people have been deputized as volunteer truth cops as well. Others evidently appreciated Fact Man’s criticism saying that there was no gambling going on in the casino, so much so that a “Community Note” was appended to the tweet, a notification window that creates a sort of ick factor around the veracity of any post it’s attached to. 

The idea is that people read the note and consider the context, but in the real world people scrolling their feeds see it and conclude the post must be “disinformation.” This is how the fact checking world of volunteer officers squelch stories they don’t like. In the case of Twitter, your only recourse is to appeal the correction, which we did. As of today, we haven’t heard back. If I do before January 6, I’ll be surprised. And that’s a shame because the public really ought to know the substance of what we reported. 

So, the military, stung by criticism that it was too slow and didn’t do enough on January 6th to help protect the capital, is now overcompensating with a vengeance. Meanwhile, Homeland Security is pulling out all stops to show that it also will be ready, particularly after the Secret Service failures of the past months. Fact check that.