The Latest Act in Israel’s Iran Nuclear Disinformation Campaign
By Gareth Porter | Consortium News | May 3, 2018
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim in his theatrical 20-minute presentation of an Israeli physical seizure of Iran’s “atomic archive” in Tehran would certainly have been the “great intelligence achievement” he boasted if it had actually happened. But the claim does not hold up under careful scrutiny, and his assertion that Israel now possesses a vast documentary record of a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program is certainly fraudulent.
Netanyahu’s tale of an Israeli intelligence raid right in Tehran that carted off 55,000 paper files and another 55,000 CDs from a “highly secret location” requires that we accept a proposition that is absurd on its face: that Iranian policymakers decided to store their most sensitive military secrets in a small tin-roofed hut with nothing to protect it from heat (thus almost certainly ensuring loss of data on CDs within a few years) and no sign of any security, based on the satellite image shown in the slide show. (As Steve Simon observed in The New York Times the door did not even appear to have a lock on it.)
The laughable explanation suggested by Israeli officials to The Daily Telegraph – that the Iranian government was afraid the files might be found by international inspectors if they remained at “major bases” — merely reveals the utter contempt that Netanyahu has for Western governments and news media. Even if Iran were pursuing nuclear weapons secretly, their files on the subject would be kept at the Ministry of Defense, not at military bases. And of course the alleged but wholly implausible move to an implausible new location came just as Netanyahu needed a dramatic new story to galvanize Trump to resist the European allies’ strong insistence on preserving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Act (JCPOA) nuclear deal with Iran.
In fact, there is no massive treasure trove of secret files about an Iran “Manhattan Project.” The shelves of black binders and CDs that Netanyahu revealed with such a dramatic flourish date back to 2003 (after which a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) said Iran had abandoned any nuclear weapons program) and became nothing more than stage props like the cartoon bomb that Netanyahu used at the United Nations in 2012.
Disinformation Campaign
Netanyahu’s cartoon bomb
Netanyahu’s claim about how Israel acquired this “atomic archive” is only the latest manifestation of a long-term disinformation campaign that the Israeli government began to work on in 2002-03. The documents to which Netanyahu referred in the presentation were introduced to the news media and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) beginning in 2005 as coming originally from a secret Iranian nuclear weapons research program. For many years U.S. news media have accepted those documents as authentic. But despite the solid media united front behind that narrative, we now know with certainty that those earlier documents were fabrications and that they were created by Israel’s Mossad.
That evidence of fraud begins with the alleged origins of the entire collection of documents. Senior intelligence officials in the George W. Bush administration had told reporters that the documents came from “a stolen Iranian laptop computer”, as The New York Times reported in November 2005. The Times quoted unnamed intelligence officials as insisting that the documents had not come from an Iranian resistance group, which would cast serious doubt on their reliability.
But it turned that the assurances from those intelligence officials were part of an official dissimulation. The first reliable account of the documents’ path to the United States came only in 2013, when former senior German foreign office official Karsten Voigt, who retired from his long-time position as coordinator of German-North American cooperation, spoke with this writer on the record.
Voigt recalled how senior officials of the German foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachtrendeinst or BND, had explained to him in November 2004 that they were familiar with the documents on the alleged Iran nuclear weapons program, because a sometime source—but not an actual intelligence agent—had provided them earlier that year. Furthermore, the BND officials explained that they had viewed the source as “doubtful,” he recalled, because the source had belonged to the Mujahideen-E Khalq, the armed Iranian opposition group that had fought Iran on behalf of Iraq during the eight year war.
BND officials were concerned that the Bush administration had begun citing those documents as evidence against Iran, because of their experience with “Curveball” – the Iraqi engineer in Germany who had told stories of Iraqi mobile bioweapons labs that had turned to be false. As a result of that meeting with BND officials, Voigt had given an interview to The Wall Street Journal in which he had contradicted the assurance of the unnamed U.S. intelligence officials to the Times and warned that the Bush administration should not base its policy on the documents it was beginning to cite as evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, because they had indeed come from “an Iranian dissident group.”
Using the MEK
The Bush administration’s desire to steer press coverage of the supposedly internal Iranian documents away from the MEK is understandable: the truth about the MEK role would immediately lead to Israel, because it was well known, that Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad had used the MEK to make public information that the Israelis did not want attributed to itself – including the precise location of Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility. As Israeli journalists Yossi Melman and Meir Javadanfar observed in their 2007 book on the Iran nuclear program, based on U.S., British and Israeli officials, “Information is ‘filtered’ to the IAEA via Iranian opposition groups, especially the National Resistance Council of Iran.”
Mossad used the MEK repeatedly in the 1990s and the early 2000’s to get the IAEA to inspect any site the Israelis suspected might possibly be nuclear-related, earning their Iranian clients a very poor reputation at the IAEA. No one familiar with the record of the MEK could have believed that it was capable of creating the detailed documents that were passed to the German government. That required an organization with the expertise in nuclear weapons and experience in fabricating documents – both of which Israel’s Mossad had in abundance.
El Baradei: Didn’t buy it
Bush administration officials had highlighted a set of 18 schematic drawings of the Shahab-3 missile’s reentry vehicle or nosecone of the missile in each of which there was a round shape representing a nuclear weapon. Those drawings were described to foreign governments and the International Atomic Energy Agency as 18 different attempts to integrate a nuclear weapon into the Shahab-3.
Netanyahu gave the public its first glimpse of one of those drawings Monday when he pointed to it triumphantly as visually striking evidence of Iranian nuclear perfidy. But that schematic drawing had a fundamental flaw that proved that it and others in the set could not have been genuine: it showed the “dunce cap” shaped reentry vehicle design of the original Shahab-3 missile that had been tested from 1998 to 2000. That was the shape that intelligence analysts outside Iran had assumed in 2002 and 2003 Iran would continue to use in its ballistic missile.
New Nose Cone
It is now well established, however, that Iran had begun redesigning the Shahab-3 missile with a conical reentry vehicle or nosecone as early as 2000 and replaced it with a completely different design that had a “triconic” or “baby bottle” shape. It made it a missile with very different flight capabilities and was ultimately called the Ghadr-1. Michael Elleman, the world’s leading expert on Iranian ballistic missiles, documented the redesign of the missile in his path-breaking 2010 study of Iran’s missile program.
Iran kept its newly-designed missile with the baby bottle reentry vehicle secret from the outside world until its first test in mid-2004. Elleman concluded that Iran was deliberately misleading the rest of the world – and especially the Israelis, who represented the most immediate threat of attack on Iran – to believe that the old model was the missile of the future while already shifting its planning to the new design, which would bring all of Israel within reach for the first time.
The authors of the drawings that Netanyahu displayed on the screen were thus in the dark about the change in the Iranian design. The earliest date of a document on the redesign of the reentry vehicle in the collection obtained by U.S. intelligence was August 28, 2002 – about two years after the actual redesign had begun. That major error indicates unmistakably that the schematic drawings showing a nuclear weapon in a Shahab-3 reentry vehicle – what Netanyahu called “integrated warhead design” were fabrications.
Netanyahu’s slide show highlighted a series of alleged revelations that he said came from the newly acquired “atomic archive” concerning the so-called “Amad Plan” and the continuation of the activities of the Iranian who was said to have led that covert nuclear weapons project. But the single pages of Farsi language documents he flashed on the screen were also clearly from the same cache of documents that we now know came from the MEK-Israeli combination. Those documents were never authenticated, and IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei, who was skeptical of their authenticity, had insisted that without such authentication, he could not accuse Iran of having a nuclear weapons program.
More Fraud
There are other indications of fraud in that collection of documents as well. A second element of the supposed covert arms program given the name “Amad Plan” was a “process flow chart” of a bench-scale system for converting uranium ore for enrichment. It had the code name “Project 5.13”, according to a briefing by the IAEA Deputy Director Olli Heinonen, and was part of a larger so-called “Project 5”, according to an official IAEA report. Another sub-project under that rubric was “Project 5.15”, which involved ore processing at the Gchine Mine.” Both sub-projects were said to be carried out by a consulting firm named Kimia Maadan.
But documents that Iran later provided to the IAEA proved that, in fact, “Project 5.15” did exist, but was a civilian project of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, not part of a covert nuclear weapons program, and that the decision had been made in August 1999 – two years before the beginning of the alleged “Amad Plan” was said to have begun.
The role of Kimia Maadan in both sub-projects explains why an ore processing project would be included in the supposed secret nuclear weapons program. One of the very few documents included in the cache that could actually be verified as authentic was a letter from Kimia Maadan on another subject, which suggests that the authors of the documents were building the collection around a few documents that could be authenticated.
Netanyahu also lingered over Iran’s denial that it had done any work on “MPI” or (“Multi-Point Initiation”) technology “in hemispheric geometry”. He asserted that “the files” showed Iran had done “extensive work” or “MPI” experiments. He did not elaborate on the point. But Israel did discover the alleged evidence of such experiments in a tin-roofed shack in Tehran. The issue of whether Iran had done such experiments was a central issue in the IAEA’s inquiry after 2008. The agency described it in a September 2008 report, which purported to be about Iran’s “experimentation in connection with symmetrical initiation of a hemispherical high explosive charge suitable for an implosion type nuclear device.”
No Official Seals
The IAEA refused to reveal which member country had provided the document to the IAEA. But former Director-General ElBaradei revealed in his memoirs that Israel had passed a series of documents to the Agency in order to establish the case that Iran had continued its nuclear weapons experiments until “at least 2007.” ElBaradei was referring to convenient timing of the report’s appearance within a few months of the U.S. NIE of November 2007 concluding that Iran had ended its nuclear weapons-related research in 2003.
Netanyahu pointed to a series of documents on the screen as well a number of drawings, photographs and technical figures, and even a grainy old black and white film, as evidence of Iran’s nuclear weapons work. But absolutely nothing about them provides an evidentiary link to the Iranian government. As Tariq Rauf, who was head of the IAEA’s Verification and Security Policy Coordination Office from 2002 to 2012, noted in an e-mail, none of the pages of text on the screen show official seals or marks that would identify them as actual Iranian government documents. The purported Iranian documents given to the IAEA in 2005 similarly lacked such official markings, as an IAEA official conceded to me in 2008.
Netanyahu’s slide show revealed more than just his over-the-top style of persuasion on the subject of Iran. It provided further evidence that the claims that had successfully swayed the U.S. and Israeli allies to join in punishing Iran for having had a nuclear weapons program were based on fabricated documents that originated in the state that had the strongest motive to make that case – Israel.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian on U.S. national security policy and the recipient of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. His most recent book is Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, published in 2014.
Russian athletes exonerated but ignored in the West
By Rick Sterling | RT | May, 2018
A major revelation in the CAS decision is that Richard McLaren, whose reports have formed the basis for banning Russians from the last two Olympics, has qualitatively changed his claim against Russian athletes.
Last year, the Disciplinary Commission of the International Olympic Committee (IOC DC) issued rulings that 44 Russian athletes were guilty of Anti-Doping Rule Violations (ADRVs) at the Sochi 2014 Olympics.
Many of these athletes had been preparing intensely for the upcoming PyeongChang Winter Olympics. Some 39 Russian athletes quickly filed appeals to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), claiming their innocence. The hearings proceeded rapidly.
On February 1, 2018, the CAS announced its decisions: they partially upheld 11 appeals and entirely upheld the appeals of the other 28 Russian athletes. The decision rocked the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). IOC President Thomas Bach said the decision was “extremely disappointing and surprising.”
A week ago, on April 23, the CAS published the full decisions for the first two of 39 Russian athletes. The documents explain the facts, evidence and reasoning behind the CAS decisions to partially or totally uphold the cases of the Russian athletes. The appeal by Aleksandr Zubkov was partly upheld. Alexander Legkov’s appeal was entirely upheld, his Sochi Olympics medals returned and his records reinstated.
McLaren changes his big accusation
The CAS decision revealed that McLaren made qualitative changes to claims made in his reports, which had formed the basis for the Russian bans. In his second report, McLaren concluded: “Over 1,000 Russian athletes competing in summer, winter and Paralympic sport, can be identified as being involved in or benefiting from manipulations to conceal positive doping tests.”
This claim featured in news headlines around the world. In the UK, The Guardian story headlined: “McLaren report: more than 1,000 Russian athletes involved in doping conspiracy.” The BBC said“Russian doping: McLaren report says more than 1,000 implicated.” The New York Times story ran: “Report Shows Vast Reach of Russian Doping: 1,000 Athletes, 30 Sports.”
The CAS decision on Alexander Legkov reveals that McLaren has changed his “key finding.” As described on page 68, “Prof. McLaren went on to explain that, in this respect, if his investigation obtained evidence that a particular athlete may have benefited from the scheme, then ‘It didn’t mean that they did benefit. It didn’t mean that they committed [an] anti-doping rule violation.'”
Sixteen months ago, international media had headlines stated that over 1,000 Russian athletes benefited from a vast state-run doping conspiracy. Now, McLaren says he did not really mean to say that… he meant that they “may have” benefited. There is a major difference between saying that someone “might have” committed a crime versus saying they did commit a crime. The former is speculative. The latter requires evidence.
The CAS looked at the evidence rather than simply accepting McLaren’s speculations and assertions.
In contrast with IOC President Bach’s statement, David Own at Inside the Games believes the CAS arbitrators are to be congratulated. “They seem to have made every effort, most properly in my view, to follow the evidence that was presented to them, while endeavoring to shut out the overheated geopolitical atmosphere still enveloping any issue pertaining to Vladimir Putin’s Russia.” He says the CAS decisions have helped buttress CAS credibility as an independent, objective and legally fair institution.
No decision on athlete’s due process rights
Unfortunately, the CAS decided to NOT consider “the athlete’s submissions concerning the alleged violations of his due process rights during the proceedings before the IOC DC… the Panel takes the view that no useful purpose would be served by determining whether the overturned findings and sanctions were the product of a procedure that failed to respect the Athlete’s due process rights.” (page 151, Legkov decision)
This is unfortunate, because the violations of due process have been blatant from the start of the accusations and penalization of Russian athletes. For example, the banning of Russian track and field and Paralympic athletes from the Rio Summer Games was based on McLaren’s first report, which did not allow Russians to respond to the accusations. The failure of due process was explained by sports attorney Ron Katz:
“Not even attempting to interview Russian officials is fundamentally unfair… Due process is not an empty phrase. Without it, there cannot be justice.”
The CAS’ “reasoned decision” reveals that the IOC Disciplinary Commission uncritically accepted the claims and assertions of Richard McLaren. In reality, as documented here, McLaren made many unfounded assertions and misrepresented the testimony of his own toolmarks expert. McLaren claimed that the findings were “immutable facts” and “conclusive” where the expert actually said: “These marks on their own should not be considered to be conclusive…” In his report, the expert added explanations for innocent causes which could result in the same type of marks. (Forensic Report EDP0902 at Evidence Disclosure Package)
Continuing the lack of due process, Russian athletes including Alexander Legkov were unfairly excluded from the most recent Winter Olympics held in PyeongChang. They were given very little time to appeal the decision banning them, and when their appeals were supported, they were still banned by the IOC. One could argue that for many of these athletes, “justice delayed is justice denied.” The February Winter Games were the last possible Olympics for some of the athletes.
When McLaren falsely claimed that “Over 1,000 Russian athletes were complicit in doping,” it was front-page news in Western media. Now that Russian athletes are being acquitted of doping violations, and relatively few are found guilty, the Western media is silent.
Czech President’s ‘Novichok bombshell’ undermines London’s credibility in Skripal case
RT | May 4, 2018
The UK’s intelligence services seem to have lost all remaining credibility, after the Czech President’s admission that his country had previously produced a nerve agent similar to the one Britain claims was used against Skripals.
“I think there are problems in and around the English spy agencies, who seem to be quite ready to manufacture evidence, in the case of the Steele dossier, maybe manufacture evidence in the case of the Skripal poisoning. And they are damaging their credibility. It takes a long time to regain credibility if you damage it this severely,” political analyst Charles Ortel told RT.
On Thursday, the Czech Republic’s president Milos Zeman revealed that his country had previously developed and tested an A-230 chemical agent of the Novichok group, similar to the one which, according to London, was Russia’s exclusively and was “highly likely” used by Moscow to poison former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury on March 4.
The accusations were followed by sanctions against Russia and the expulsion of Russian diplomats from the UK and other countries that backed Britain’s stance. Ortel blamed the media for dangerously exacerbating the crisis without vetting the information coming out of London with due diligence.
“I think it is irresponsible the way supposed main street journalists leap on these stories without really vetting it and then get us into a place where tensions are escalated around the world, including two nuclear-armed powers Russia and the United States, and the third in the UK. This is a dangerous business,” Ortel said.
The claims of Russian involvement have not been backed up by either Britain’s own scientists at the Porton Down laboratories or by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), both of which say it’s not their job to apportion blame or to identify the toxin’s origin, but only the type of substance involved. Russia has also repeatedly denied the allegations and accused the UK of excluding it from the investigation, and of destroying evidence.
“I think it is a very dangerous business to start making accusations as serious as have been made in the case of Skripal, in the case of Steele… that are not actually backed up by hard facts,” the political analyst noted.
Baseless accusations, Ortel believes, could potentially ruin the career of British Prime Minister Theresa May, who, together with Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, led the charge against Moscow. After all, Russia has repeatedly reiterated that a number of countries had the means to produce nerve agents of the Novichok group.
“Lots of countries have made these. There is probably at least a dozen countries that have the capabilities to make these persistent nerve agents. And it does not surprise me that the Czech Republic and many other countries could do this. The Czech Republic is very advanced in their chemical and synthetic chemistry ability. And many nation states could have done this,” chemical weapons expert and Rice University professor James Tour told RT.
“Britain is in a very dangerous place and they kind-of have to stick to their story and it is possible that, by sticking to this story, the May government may ultimately be sacked,” Ortel told RT. “So they are in a place where it will be very difficult for them to admit a mistake after all these weeks and after their strong positions and actions that so many governments took, our own included, the US in reliance mostly on UK analysis.”
Previously, Moscow pointed out that UK authorities themselves admitted that their lab in Porton Down was in possession of the nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. In fact, many countries have been developing and testing the A-class nerve agents just to have them in their own arsenals or find ways to defend against them, Professor Tour explained.
“Many countries have made it in the past as part of a study of making the nerve agents. And many countries have made nerve agents if you want to study what persistent nerve agent could be like – something that is harder to detect, something that lasts much longer than a typical nerve agent like Sarin, Soman, or GF – then you want to be making these and understanding how they work. Sometimes countries make it just to learn how to defend against it. They might make it to learn how to build an antidote for it.”
See also:
UK, Slovakia, Sweden, Czech Republic among most probable sources of ‘Novichok’ – Moscow
We get impression UK govt is deliberately destroying evidence in Skripal case – Russian Ambassador
Dr Alexander Yakovenko, Ambassador to the UK – RT – May 3, 2018
On 4 March 2018 two Russian citizens Sergei and Yulia Skripal were reportedly poisoned in Salisbury, Wiltshire with the toxic chemical named A-234 under the British classification.
On 12 March Foreign Secretary Johnson summoned me to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and said that Russia was “highly likely” responsible for the attack. He invited us to respond by the next day, whether this had been a direct act by the state or Russia had lost control over this nerve agent.
The incident had international repercussions, including expulsion of 150 Russian diplomats from 28 countries, notwithstanding the fact that the charges were based on assumptions and unverifiable intelligence. The Western countries lost the same number of Moscow-based staff. Meanwhile, the British government provided no evidence either to the public, its allies or Russia. Subsequent events revealed that no proof of Russia’s involvement existed. On 1 May, National Security adviser Sir Mark Sedwill confirmed that (despite a number of previous leaks) no suspect had been identified, a statement that speaks for itself.
Two months have passed since the poisoning and more than a month since Prime Minister May accused Russia of this crime. However, despite our numerous requests, we have not been granted access to the investigation. The FCO and the Metropolitan Police have refrained from contacts.
We have been denied consular access to our citizens in violation of the Vienna Convention on the Consular Relations and the bilateral Consular Convention. We are still unable to verify their whereabouts, health and wishes. Considering all the facts, we now have more reasons to qualify this situation as an abduction of the two Russian nationals. We will continue to seek the truth and demand answers from the British side.
We also get the impression that the British government is deliberately destroying the evidence, classifying all remaining materials and making independent investigation impossible. Sergei Skripal’s pets were incinerated without having been tested for exposure to nerve agents. Then a decontamination of the area was announced, which reportedly included destruction of potentially contaminated objects along with Sergei Skripal’s house, the “Mill” pub and the “Zizzi” restaurant.
The media coverage of the Salisbury poisoning is not as free as it should be. On 8 April it was reported that the National Security Council “had seized control” over the media response to the incident. On 18 April the media regulator Ofcom announced investigations into the RT channel regarding Salisbury. Is it a coincidence that no one has ever seen any photos of the Skripals since the incident, and no attempts have been made by the media to interview them? Hospital privacy and security might be an excuse, but it looks like the Skripals’ privacy is better protected than that of pop stars and even the Royal family.
The UK has also refused to interact with Russia in the OPCW. Instead of using the standard procedures, whereby Britain could have engaged Russia directly or through the OPCW Executive Council, the British government has chosen to cooperate with the OPCW Technical Secretariat under a classified arrangement. On 13 April Russia itself initiated Article IX of the Chemical Weapons Convention procedure to obtain a response to a list of questions to the UK submitted via the OPCW.
Replies received are unsatisfactory and don’t answer our legitimate and reasonable questions and thus don’t help establish the truth. As to the OPCW report, it clearly lacked impartiality as the OPCW-designated laboratories were given only one task, which was to check whether the nerve agent identified by the UK was present in the biomedical samples, and the samples were taken only in the locations designated by the British side.
Meanwhile, the UK is depicted, by the Conservative government, as the “leader” of the Western efforts to “hold Russia to account”. It seems that the Cabinet has no interest in functional bilateral relations, which have reached a new low since the Salisbury poisoning. Russia is again presented as a “cyber threat” and the British public is being prepared for a massive cyber attack against Russia, which would purport to be retaliatory by nature, but in fact would constitute an unprovoked use of force. The Foreign Office has ignored the Russian offer for consultations on cyber-security.
Nevertheless, every day the Embassy receives letters from the British public with regrets over the current official policy towards Russia. People fail to understand how it is possible to blame Russia without any proof or evidence being presented to the international community. This contradicts the British tradition of open and fair work of judiciary. Many believe that this policy is rooted in the anti-Russian sentiment within the current Conservative government.
The Embassy has published a report “Salisbury: a classified case”, which summarizes the sequence of events and Britain’s and Russia’s positions. I invite the British side to give it a thorough consideration. The list of questions to the British government is constantly growing. What we demand in the first place is transparency.
Dr Alexander Yakovenko, Russian Ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Deputy foreign minister (2005-2011). Follow him on Twitter @Amb_Yakovenko.
Ex-Israel chief military prosecutor lives in home built on privately-owned Palestinian land
MEMO | May 3, 2018
A former chief Israeli military prosecutor lives in a house in the West Bank settlement of Efrat “which was illegally constructed on private Palestinian land”, it has been revealed.
According to anti-occupation NGO Kerem Navot, Lieutenant Colonel Morris Hirsch served as the chief military prosecutor in the West Bank until about a year and a half ago, “and was responsible for legal proceedings against thousands of Palestinians each year”.
In addition, “since his release, he has been employed as a ‘military consultant’ by the right-wing organisation NGO Monitor”.
Kerem Navot has now revealed that Hirsch not only lives in a West Bank settlement, but his house is located on privately-owned Palestinian land.
An Israeli company says it bought the land “from some Arabs”, but have no evidence to prove the claim. This did not prevent Israeli authorities “from allowing the company to advance a master plan on site and to authorise the two illegally constructed housing units, in one of which Hirsch resides”.
Kerem Navot said it is “ironic” that an individual “who was responsible for the rotten prosecution system that Israel runs in the West Bank for several years, currently lives in a house that was built solely due to the very same rottenness that pervades the law enforcement system in its entirety”.
McCain Calls on US to Retaliate With Cyberattack on Russia to Embarrass Putin
Sputnik | May 3, 2018
According to Senator John McCain, America should consider a cyberattack against President Vladimir Putin to retaliate for Moscow’s alleged interference into the 2016 US presidential election in order to send a message to Russia.
In his upcoming book, entitled “The Restless Wave,” McCain has touched upon the allegations that the Kremlin could have so-called “kompromat” [compromising material] on President Donald Trump, as well as Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential election in the United States – an accusation, which Moscow has consistently repudiated.
“I’m of the opinion that unless [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is made to regret his decision he will return to the scene of the crime again and again,” McCain wrote, adding that in order “to make Putin deeply regret his assault on the foundation of our democracy – free and fair elections – we should seriously consider retaliating with the kinds of weapons he used. We have cyber capabilities too. They should be used to expose the epic scale of his regime’s corruption or to embarrass [Putin] in other ways.”
Senator McCain went on to call on the United States to take an offensive stance in the information war with Russia, being very critical of Trump’s perception of Moscow as a potential ally.
“[Putin] never was, he is not now and never will be our partner. He sees evidence of his success every day in our polarization and gridlock,” he elaborated.
In the meantime, he wrote that he was quite skeptical that the sitting president or his aides had colluded with the Kremlin during the 2016 election.
“And I certainly did not want to believe that the Kremlin could have acquired kompromat on an American President.”
The 81-year-old McCain has used his book to dismiss the “Russia hater” label, on a previous occasion the Kremlin described his attitude towards Moscow as a “maniacal hatred towards our country.”
McCain has consistently hurled obscenities at President Putin, coming up with such epithets as “butcher,” a “thug,” a “killer,” a “KGB agent,” an “evil man,” and even called him a greater threat to the United States than Daesh.
In March, the senator lashed out at President Trump for a phone conversation with his Russian counterpart, in which POTUS congratulated Putin following his election win. Previously, McCain had accused the Trump Administration of “playing right into the hands of Vladimir Putin.”
READ MORE:
McCain Supports Strikes on Syria, Urges New Strategy for US in Syria
From the Skripals to Douma, the Globalist Pravda Network Reveals its True Face
By Rob Slane | The Blog Mire | May 2, 2018
People living in the Soviet Union had a wonderful phrase to describe the two biggest circulation state-controlled newspapers, Pravda (meaning “truth”) and Izvestia (meaning “news”). There’s no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia, was the oft-repeated expression. It is unfortunate that the mainstream media in the Western nations these days don’t have similar sorts of names, since it deprives us of an endless source of amusement in coming up with similarly apposite phrases about them.
It is, however, increasingly clear that on the great issues of the day, you are about as likely to find the truth in them as you would have done in Pravda, although I expect their sports and gardening sections are still relatively reliable. As for the important political and geopolitical issues of the day, I tend to imagine that on the walls next to the desks in the offices of many of these papers and broadcasters are the following instructions:
Rules for Reporting on Global Affairs
- Repeat Government line unquestioningly.
- If Government line is questioned, accuse those doing the questioning of being Bots, Kremlin-trolls and useful idiots.
- If the persistent questioning won’t go away and the Government line is seen to be contradictory and full of holes, bury the issue completely and start posing deep questions, such as “What will Meghan wear?” or “Is there a gender pay gap in midwifery?” or “How much sugar is really bad for you?”
The Skripal and Douma episodes have demonstrated this perhaps more than any others. First the Government line has been dutifully parroted by the media in a relentless propaganda campaign — no questions asked. Then there have been attempts to silence or ridicule those who didn’t bow to the parrots and who were asking legitimate questions — including the appalling treatment meted out to distinguished military men. And finally, both issues now appear to have been “disappeared” down the Memory Hole, apparently to be forgotten forever and ever.
This last point is so obvious in the Skripal case that it has caused some to speculate that the British Government has slapped a D-Notice on the case (this is a formal notice to the media to limit their coverage of the story on grounds of “national security”). I can hardly help thinking of that without giving a horse laugh. A D-Notice to stop the media reporting on the case on the grounds of national security? What’s funny about it is that all the media has done since day one of the case is to endlessly repeat the Government line on absolutely everything, even when that line became so utterly ludicrous that believing it required one to hold a number of contradictory and irreconcilable thoughts in one’s head at the same time.
In other words, if there is indeed a D-Notice on the issue, which seems very likely given the fact that there is now almost zero coverage of the case in the British media, it can have nothing to do with national security, per se, since from the get-go it was clear that the media had no interest in investigating any of the claims made by Government. The Government line was perfectly safe from being questioned by those who are apparently not able to report on it now, and so one can only conclude that it is because the Government line is so obviously full of holes that reporting on it needed to be stopped, lest increasing numbers of rational people recognised it to be somewhat barking.
It’s a shame really. I began to look forward to seeing what each day’s new dose of cock and bull would bring forth. They were poisoned at the restaurant. No the car. No the cemetery. The flowers. No, it was in the luggage. No, the bench. No, it was porridge. No, no, no! It was on the door handle, and it was liquid, which although tending to be runny, remained there for three weeks, even in all that rain and snow, in highly pure form, and you know the amazing thing is that people without protection stood just feet away from it, and they are fine. Whoda thunk it? But it is military-grade nerve agent “of a type developed by Russia” nonetheless. Seriously guv.
Oh and they’re in a coma. Sergei and Yulia, that is. Like to die they are. A judge will probably have to take the decision to switch off their life support. Oh hang on, Yulia’s on the phone. Yes of course she is. She’s fine. Sorry we forgot to mention that before when we were talking about the life support machine. And Sergei’s okay too. Yes we can confirm that. Sorry we didn’t mention that before either. But he’s unable to talk. So you won’t hear from him. Or her. He’s in the hospital, though. Probably. Don’t know where she is. Not to be disturbed though.
Oh and there’s the policeman at the bench. Sorry, we meant the house. The house and the bench. Which one? How on earth should we know? Both probably. At the same time. But he can’t talk either.
What is particularly funny is that according to Mark Sedwell, the UK’s National Security Advisor, certain classified information – such as the apparent door handle delivery method – was released in order to “counter Russian disinformation”. Ah so it was Russian disinformation that took us from the restaurant to the car to the cemetery to the flowers to the luggage to the bench via the porridge and finally (finally???) to the door handle (I say “finally???” only because nobody has yet suggested the cat as the conduit for the poison)? So it was Russian disinformation that tried to sell us the idea of a slow-working, lethal yet non-lethal, military-grade nerve agent that enables its victims to go to restaurants, make them hallucinate and then be as right as rain a few weeks later? So it was Russian disinformation that told us that after studying hours of CCTV footage, British intelligence had a suspect in the case – the dashingly handsome, astonishingly intelligent, and diabolically ruthless former KGB agent, codenamed “Gordon” or was it “Cecil” or “Squiffy” or something, with a penchant for martial arts and (who can doubt) fast cars and loose women – only for Mark Sedwell to tell MPs a week later that there is no suspect, there never has been a suspect, and the investigation has been hampered by lack of CCTV footage?
Russian disinformation? Alas no. It was the UK media wot did it. They managed to put about more disinformation, stuff and nonsense, and cock and bull in a month or so than 10,000 “trolls” working 16 hour shifts in a basement in St. Petersburg could have done in a decade. And so you can see why the Government might want to slap a D-Notice on it, can’t you? Except that it should obviously be a C-Notice, the C standing for Comedy.
As for Douma, the media excelled itself there as well. There we have three Governments, apparently dropping bombs on chemical weapons depots in response to an unproven chemical weapons attack, and not one journalist in the mainstream media thought to say, “Hang on a minute! You dropped bombs on what you thought was a chemical weapons depot? Isn’t that … em … a tad on the dangerous side? Toxic fumes and people in the surrounding area becoming contaminated and all that?”
And when nobody became contaminated, not one mainstream media journalist thought to ask, “Hang on a minute! Isn’t the fact that there was no release of toxic substances into the atmosphere when you bombed it sort of like evidence that … em … how can we put it … there weren’t any toxic substances there?”
And when one of the little boys and the doctors in the “chemical attack” video that the Western Governments used as a pretext to bomb a sovereign country and spook us into wondering whether WWIII was about to start — when they turned up alive and well in The Hague to testify that there was no chemical attack, did even one mainstream media journalist think to themselves, “Maybe it would be good to hear what they have to say, since they were there?” Alas no. Some moved onto number 2 in the Rules for Reporting on Global Affairs, denouncing with barely concealed fury the testimony of the very people who had appeared in the original video that had once seemed so persuasive to them, whilst others moved onto number 3, and started talking about what Kim Kardashian has been up to lately.
It is clear that there is a deep sickness at the heart of the media. The whole point of its existence is to investigate incidents, to go where the facts lead it, and to serve ordinary people by attempting to report and reveal what is true. And above all that, it is to act as a check on the overweening state, so that it does not feel that it has carte blanche to do whatsoever it wishes.
But the handling of these two major cases has shown perhaps more than ever before that it has no intention of doing these things. It will not investigate, it has no intention of revealing inconvenient facts, and it cares little for the truth. And above all, instead of acting as a break on the state and on Government recklessness, its chief concern now appears to be doing the bidding of a very powerful group of Globalists, defending and advancing their diabolical agenda, regardless of what is and what isn’t true.
What should we call such a media that seems to have little or no regard for the truth, and which collectively serves the interests of the Global elite? Mainstream? Globalist Pravda Network seems to me to be a more accurate description.
“Russian Talking Points” Look An Awful Lot Like Well-Documented Facts
By Caitlyn Johnstone | Rogue Journalist | May 2, 2018
Things aren’t looking great for the Democratic establishment, which recently admitted that it stacks its primaries against progressive candidates and is currently engaged in a desperate, hail Mary lawsuit against WikiLeaks for its factual publications about the party. So of course you know what that means.
That’s right! It’s time for Democratic pundits to begin down-punching Jill Stein.
Jill Stein is on @NewDay right now repeating Russian talking points on its interference in the 2016 election and on US foreign policy.
— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) May 1, 2018
WATCH: Jill Stein refuses to condemn Russian election interference in babbling CNN interview https://t.co/klX5ivLLrG
— Raw Story (@RawStory) May 1, 2018
“Jill Stein is on @NewDay right now repeating Russian talking points on its interference in the 2016 election and on US foreign policy,” tweeted CNN Chief National Security Correspondent Jim Sciutto today, without shame or self-reflection.
Sciutto was referring to comments Stein made on a CNN interview today about America’s undeniable, entirely factual and well-documented history of meddling in other countries’ elections, including a citation of an ex-CIA Director’s recent admission that the US has interfered in foreign electoral processes and continues to do so to this day.
Because that’s what constitutes a “Russian talking point” these days: raw, easily verifiable facts.
Stein’s interviewer, Chris “It’s illegal to read WikiLeaks” Cuomo, echoed a similar sentiment in response to her points, in essence arguing that only Russians should be stating these blatantly obvious and extremely relevant facts.
“You know, that would be the case for Russia to make, not from the American perspective,” Cuomo said. “Of course, there’s hypocrisy involved, lots of different big state actors do lots of things that they may not want people to know about. But let Russia say that the United States did it to us, and here’s how they did it, so this is fair play. From the American perspective and you running for president, more than once of this country, shouldn’t your position have been, this was bad what they did, they’re trying to do it right now and we have to stop it?”
Right. Because you have so many Russians on your show making that case, do you Chris?
This is absolute lunacy. The implication here is that it isn’t ever okay for Americans to talk about Russia in any other context than how awful and evil its government is; that nobody can speak about how America’s behavior factors into the equation in a very real and significant way. Not because it’s not factual, not because it’s not relevant, but because it’s a “Russian talking point”, and only Russians should be saying it.
And this sentiment being promulgated by these establishment pundits is being swallowed hook, line and sinker by the rank-and-file citizenry who consume such media. Every single day, without exception, I am accused multiple times of being a propagandist for the Kremlin. Not because there’s any evidence for that, not because I’m writing anything that is untruthful, but because I’m writing “Russian talking points”, i.e. arguments that have ostensibly been made at some point by Russians.
And it is, to be perfectly honest, infuriating. These people are actively making the case for willful ignorance and stupidity. They’re actively arguing that facts which don’t support the narratives being promulgated by the CIA and the State Department should be completely excluded from all discussion within the western hemisphere, and that only Russians should be making them. They do this while simultaneously arguing that Russian media is dangerous and should be avoided by Americans. Only Russians should argue against CIA/CNN narratives, and we should never, ever listen to those arguments.
They’re arguing for the deliberate omission of relevant facts from dialogue. They are arguing that we should all be morons, on purpose.
Of course it’s relevant to the discussion that the US interferes with foreign democratic processes far more than any other government on the planet! Are you nuts? Yes, obviously if yours is the primary country responsible creating a climate wherein governments meddle in the elections of other nations, that undeniable fact must necessarily be a part of any sensible analysis of what’s happening and what should be done about it. Anyone who tries to argue that that fact shouldn’t be a part of the conversation is making an argument in favor of stupidity.
That’s not a “whataboutism”, as empire loyalists like Eric Boehlert habitually claim. It’s crucial factual information.
pressed on Russia election interference, Jill Stein on CNN opts for Russian wahtaboutism–America does it too, and even worse!!
she’s a self-parody
— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) May 1, 2018
The environment that these pundits are creating is itself hostile to democracy. If all “talking points” are excluded from the conversation other than those which lead to continually escalating sanctions, proxy wars, nuclear posturing and brinkmanship, then there’s no way for activism or democracy to tap the brake on the west’s ongoing trajectory toward direct military confrontation with a nuclear superpower.
In her interview, Stein outlined this quite clearly:
“You know, I think that kind of position which says that we’re in a totally different category from the rest of the world is not working. This century of American domination, you know, sort of didn’t play out the way we thought it would, we’re embroiled now — we have the military in practically every country around the world. In the recent taxes that people pay, the average American paid almost $3,500 that went into the Department of Offense, I would call it, not the Department of Defense, $3,500, whereas we put $40 into the EPA.
“You know, 57 percent of our discretionary dollars now are going into the military. It’s part of a mindset that says, we’re always right and they’re always wrong and we’re going to be dominating militarily and economically. We’re in a multi-polar world right now and, you know, we need to behave as an exemplary member of the community and that is by upholding ourselves and leading the way on international law, human rights and diplomacy. That approach is really paying off on the Korean peninsula right now. I think we should be using it more broadly.”
Cuomo, who as the son of a New York Governor and brother of the current New York Governor is as much Democratic Party royalty as a Clinton, had some very interesting facial expressions in response to Stein’s arguments. Whenever an interviewee makes strong points which go against the establishment grain he always looks like he’s taking a really uncomfortable shit:
There have been far too many cartoonishly absurd responses to Stein’s interview for me to address in a single article without putting my laptop through the wall in a fit of rage, but this tweet from MSNBC and Atlantic contributor Natasha Bertrand is really something else.
“Jill Stein just told @CNN that her presence at RT gala in Moscow Dec 2015 wasn’t controversial at the time because Obama ‘was still on track for a reboot’ with Putin,” said Bertrand, adding that “Russia had already annexed Crimea, invaded eastern Ukraine, intervened in Syria for Assad, and hacked the DNC.”
This is actual, real-life “Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia” Orwellian revisionist doublethink. There was no public information about any Russian DNC hack in 2015, and the average American hardly ever thought about Russia at that time. Then-Secretary of State John Kerry personally met with Vladimir Putin in July of 2016 to discuss collaboration against terrorist forces in Syria. Only in the most warped, revisionist, funhouse mirror Orwellian reality tunnel can it be claimed that Stein visiting Moscow in December of 2015 would have been considered shady or controversial at the time.
Jill Stein just told @CNN that her presence at RT gala in Moscow Dec 2015 wasn’t controversial at the time because Obama “was still on track for a reboot” with Putin.
(Russia had already annexed Crimea, invaded eastern Ukraine, intervened in Syria for Assad, and hacked the DNC.)— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) May 1, 2018
The fact that Bertrand’s tweet was liked and shared thousands of times on Twitter is extremely creepy and disturbing. Establishment media didn’t start indoctrinating American liberals with Russia hysteria until the tail end of 2016, but it’s been so effective that MSNBC mainliners are now gaslighting themselves into a revision of their own history.
This is why people like myself fight the CIA/CNN Russia narrative so aggressively. Not because we’re propagandists, not because we’re “useful idiots”, not because of “Russian talking points”, but because the US-centralized power establishment’s nonstop campaign to manufacture support for its agendas of global hegemony are making us all stupid and crazy.
Stop playing along with this bullshit. Stop letting them make us stupid and crazy. Stop letting them manipulate us into consenting to escalations with a nuclear superpower. Stop. Turn back. Wrong way.
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Wars for Israel: A reminder of who’s giving the marching orders
By Damian Lataan | February 7, 2012
As the West prepares to march off to yet another war in the Middle East, we should perhaps remind ourselves of who is giving the West their marching orders.
In February 2003, just weeks before the US and their allies launched their attack on Iraq and her peoples, a delegation of US congressmen, together with the US Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, a well known pro-Zionist and neoconservative war-hawk, were in Israel at the invitation of the Israeli government then led by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Addressing the congressmen, Sharon told them ‘that Iran, Libya and Syria should be stripped of weapons of mass destruction after Iraq’. Later, Sharon told John Bolton ‘that Israel was concerned about the security threat posed by Iran, and stressed that it was important to deal with Iran even while American attention was focused on Iraq’. … continue
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