By Ekaterina Blinova – Samizdat – 23.09.2022
Referendums on territorial affiliation are taking place in the Donbass, Kherson, and Zaporozhye regions on September 23-27. Earlier, surveys showed that a majority of residents supported the idea of joining Russia as subjects of the Russian Federation.
Voting in referendums on joining Russia began on September 23. Earlier, on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered an address to the nation to ensure security at the forthcoming plebiscites, and announced partial mobilization in the country. Putin’s speech was met with hostility by the US and its NATO allies, who branded the self-determination right of the referendum participants as a “sham” and vowed to never recognize the outcome of the votes.
“Europe fears that during the referendum even more regions of present-day Ukraine will want to distance themselves from the imposed European policy and request Russia’s help,” says Mehdi Khorsand, head of the Department of Economic Diplomacy of the Municipality of Tehran and expert on Eurasia. “At the same time, it will become a kind of threat to Europe, which for two centuries has been putting pressure on countries seeking to gain independence.”
The collective West, in particular Europeans and Americans, wants to keep an unquenchable long-term conflict in the region in order to weaken Russia, according to Khorsand. However, the ongoing referendums could create the conditions for bringing the conflict to an end, he underscores.
“Russia started its special [military] operation in Ukraine only for security reasons,” the Iranian expert notes. “If the government of Ukraine, after the tensions of 2014, had adhered to its obligations under the Minsk agreements, we would have never witnessed these hostilities, this conflict. It would have never begun in the first place.”
Donbass’ Thorny Way to Independence
After the US-backed February 2014 coup d’etat, Ukraine’s eastern regions called for autonomy resisting the rule of the military junta in Kiev. In response, Kiev started a “counter-terror operation” seeking to suppress “separatists” in the east. The Normandy Four, a format comprising Russia, Germany, France, and Ukraine, worked out a roadmap, the Minsk accords, to stop the bloodshed in Donbass and provide the breakaway regions with an autonomous status. Nevertheless, Kiev’s successive governments routinely sabotaged the provisions of the Minsk agreements preventing Donbass from gaining legitimate autonomy. In addition to that, the Ukrainian nationalist leadership made NATO membership the centerpiece of its policy, ramping up military training and resorting to the weaponization of the country.
“After 2014, Russia tried to negotiate with Ukraine about its demilitarization, not joining NATO, about the independence and autonomy of the eastern regions: Lugansk and Donetsk. But the Ukrainian government after 2014 committed a real genocide of the [ethnic] Russian population in the east of Ukraine, they began to literally ‘slaughter’ the Russians there,” Khorsand says.
Moscow repeatedly called on the other guarantors of the Minsk agreements, Paris and Berlin, to pressure Kiev to observe the accords. As these attempts failed, Russia came up with draft security agreements requesting guarantees of Ukraine’s non-admission to NATO. Moscow handed the drafts to the US and the transatlantic alliance in December 2021, reminding them of Western leaders’ pledge to not expand NATO to Russia’s doorstep. The Russian leadership made it clear that it takes its national security seriously and would resort to military-technical options if the West were to ignore the drafts. Nonetheless, the US, the EU, and NATO rejected key provisions of Moscow’s proposals.
“Russia, given the seriousness of the topic of Ukraine’s accession to NATO, did not see any other solution than the start of a special [military] operation to resolve the security problem,” Khorsand says.
Referendums as Path to Get Protection From Yoke of Kiev Regime
“We expect the referenda to end up with the majority of the inhabitants of these regions voting in favor of joining Russia. I do not rule out that the hostilities will end after the referendum,” Khorsand notes.
Russia recognized the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics on February 22; still, this decision made the regions merely a “buffer zone” between Russia and Ukraine, which did not guarantee their safety, the Iranian expert explains.
If admitted to the Russian Federation, the aforementioned regions, including Kherson and Zaporozhye, will have security guarantees as inalienable parts of Russia. The Donbass republics and the Zaporozhye and Kherson regional authorities announced on September 19 and 20 their intent to simultaneously hold referendums to join Russia. In his Wednesday speech, President Putin made it clear that Russia would protect its territorial integrity and sovereignty by all modern military means, adding that he wasn’t “bluffing.”
“As for the legality of the referendums, it is worth noting that the autonomy of the regions of Donbass (LPR and DPR) was fully accepted in the 2014 agreement (Minsk agreements) and mentioned in the terms of this document, respectively, this referendum, reflecting the will and desire of the people of the autonomous and sovereign republics of Donbass to join Russia is a legitimate action,” Khorsand says.
Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov explained in an interview with Newsweek that the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), and the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions used their sacred right to self-determination, which is codified in the UN Charter, when they announced their intention to join Russia.
“Of course, the US and Europe will be forced to take some other position after these legal referendums, because these referendums create an opportunity to remove tension between Russia and Ukraine, and to stop hostilities,” Khorsand concludes.
Samizdat | September 20, 2022
The US Department of Justice would like Congress to amend laws governing asset forfeiture, so money confiscated from Russian “kleptocrats” can be given to Ukraine, the head of the interagency sanctions task force Andrew Adams told the Senate on Tuesday while testifying at a hearing called “Tightening the Screws on Russia.”
Adams, formerly a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York (SDNY), is the head of the interagency Task Force KleptoCapture, a sanctions enforcement outfit created in February. The “scope, intended impact, and international alignment” of the anti-Russia sanctions are “without precedent,” he told senators.
Among the proposals he listed at the hearing was a pitch for Congress to amend the existing US asset forfeiture laws, in order to allow the government to “remediate harms caused to Ukraine by Russia’s war of aggression,” as Adams put it.
The departments of justice, treasury and state would like the ability to give the funds seized from Russia and Russians to the government in Kiev, but doing so “requires amendments to multiple statutes governing the use of forfeited funds,” he said.
Earlier in his testimony, Adams mentioned that the measures implemented by the US and its allies “have included immobilizing the Russian Central Bank’s assets, held in coffers around the world.” It was not clear, however, whether these funds would fall under the scheme to transfer money to Ukraine – something the government in Kiev has demanded for months, both of the US and of the EU.
Asset forfeiture is a controversial practice in US law, which proponents have defended as a “key tool” for weakening organized crime and funding law enforcement. Critics, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have called it “policing for profit” and described it as “egregiously at odds with our due process rights.”
Samizdat | September 20, 2022
Senior officials in Kiev have dismissed as irrelevant plans for a number of current and former Ukrainian regions to hold referendums on whether to join Russia.
Andrey Yermak, President Vladimir Zelensky’s chief of staff, described the proposed votes as “blackmail” by Moscow.
“This is what fear of defeat looks like. The enemy is afraid and uses primitive manipulations,” he said in a post on social media on Tuesday.
Yermak added that “Ukraine will solve the Russian question,” insisting this could be done “only by force.”
Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba also downplayed news of the upcoming referendums, dismissing the move as a “sham.”
“Ukraine has every right to liberate its territories and will keep liberating them whatever Russia has to say,” he tweeted.
The condemnations and threats came in response to bids by the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as Ukraine’s Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, to hold referendums on the question of joining the Russian Federation. The votes could take place as early as this week.
Kiev previously threatened any person who takes part in such a plebiscite with criminal prosecution. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk said participants could be sent to prison for up to 12 years.
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | September 15, 2022
Sometimes police will be given quotas for ticketing drivers. Results of the pressure put on cops to meet their ticket targets tend to include that many drivers are pulled over and ticketed for minor infractions that would be better overlooked or based on dubious or fabricated grounds. Is a similar quota system, with expectable similar results, developing now in regard to “domestic terrorism” and “white supremacy” related crime at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)?
A Wednesday Washington Times article by Kerry Picket and Joseph Clark, referencing information provided by current and former FBI agents, suggests that is the case. Picket and Clark write:
Current and former FBI agents tell The Washington Times that the perceived threat has become overblown under the administration. They say bureau analysts and top officials are pressuring FBI agents to create domestic terrorist cases and tag people as White supremacists to meet internal metrics.
“The demand for White supremacy” coming from FBI headquarters “vastly outstrips the supply of White supremacy,” said one agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We have more people assigned to investigate White supremacists than we can actually find.”
The agent said those driving bureau policies “have already determined that White supremacy is a problem” and set agencywide policy to elevate racially motivated domestic extremism cases as priorities.
“We are sort of the lapdogs as the actual agents doing these sorts of investigations, trying to find a crime to fit otherwise First Amendment-protected activities,” he said. “If they have a Gadsden flag and they own guns and they are mean at school board meetings, that’s probably a domestic terrorist.”
The Gadsden flag is a historical American flag with a yellow field showing a timber rattlesnake and the words: “Don’t Tread on Me.” It is often used as a symbol of liberty.
Read the complete article here.
Igor Danchenko’s confession appears to reveal the bureau’s true intentions
By Felix Livshitz | Samizdat | September 20, 2022
Lawyers for Igor Danchenko, the primary source of the notorious and utterly discredited “Trump-Russia|” dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, have filed a motion to dismiss the charges brought against their client by special counsel John Durham.
In the process, they have revealed another startling and potentially criminal dimension to the FBI’s probe of potential collusion between the campaign of former President Donald Trump and the Kremlin.
Danchenko’s case
Durham charged Danchenko in November 2021 with five counts of lying to the bureau. Four of those relate to statements he made in a February 2017 interview, in which he repeatedly claimed to have met and had conversations with Sergey Millian, a Belarusian-born businessman who claimed ties with the Trump campaign.
Danchenko, and thus Steele, claimed Millian was a key source of the dossier’s most explosive allegations – namely, that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and the Kremlin, that Russia’s GRU had hacked the Democratic National Convention email server and provided the content for WikiLeaks for the purposes of “plausible deniability,” and the then-Presidential candidate had received a “golden shower” from prostitutes while in Moscow years earlier, which was filmed by Russian intelligence and could be used as “kompromat.”
In his FBI interview, conducted between February 9 and 12, 2017, Danchenko claimed to have received this incendiary intelligence through telephone conversations and email exchanges with Millian, who also suggested they discuss matters further in person in New York City. However, Durham charges that Danchenko fabricated these calls, repeatedly emailed Millian without response, and was never invited to any meeting anywhere.
The new court filing shows that to buttress these claims, Danchenko provided the Bureau with a synopsis of a mid-August email he sent to Millian, a month prior to his sit-down interview series. Yet, as the filing notes, the communication makes no mention of the phonecalls they’d purportedly engaged in previously, or the prospect of meeting in person.
Danchenko’s lawyers now argue that this email in fact proves he wasn’t lying about having had direct contact with Millian, and made clear they’d never spoken to his interviewers. Problematically for all involved, though, Danchenko, and as a result Steele, both attributed wild charges against the Trump campaign to Millian before this email.
FBI vs the truth
In turn too, this means the FBI had concrete reasons to believe at least some of the Steele dossier was bogus on January 25, 2017 at the very latest. But the Bureau, undeterred, continued to not only “assess” the dossier’s veracity, but to use it as a justification for further surveillance of Trump 2016 presidential campaign adviser Carter Page, and intensifying its investigation of the campaign.
The FBI’s questionable use of the dossier in court submissions to secure FISA warrants against Page is well-known, and was a key criticism of a December 2019 Justice Department Inspector General review, which determined the Bureau made 17 errors or omissions in its FISA applications.
Even more damningly though, just two days after Danchenko presented the discrediting email to the FBI, Trump privately met with then-FBI director James Comey, and the President specifically raised the Steele dossier.
According to Comey’s account of the dinner, as retold in the Mueller report: “the President… stated that he was thinking about ordering the FBI to investigate the [Steele] allegations to prove they were false. Comey responded that the President should think carefully about issuing such an order because it could create a narrative that the FBI was investigating him personally, which was incorrect.”
In other words, Comey played Trump, appealing to his ego and feigning concern for his reputation, when he knew better than anyone bar Steele and Danchenko themselves that the FBI was already investigating the former MI6 operative’s “allegations” and knew them to be meritless. Had he told the truth, perhaps the entire Russiagate fraud would’ve collapsed before it had even properly erupted publicly.
If he’d known, the President may not have been successfully pressured into demonstrating his anti-Russian credentials with an increasingly hostile and belligerent stance towards Moscow, which saw Trump go to dangerous lengths the previous administration had deliberately avoided, such as arming and legitimizing the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, and shredding vital Cold War arms control treaties, brinksmanship that brought us to where we are today.
Hate of Bureau
In any event, while the filing is in many ways useful confirmation of top-level FBI knowledge of the dossier’s inherent worthlessness at an early stage, it could pose problems for Danchenko’s prosecution.
His conviction hangs on the ability of Durham’s team to prove his lies to the FBI materially influenced its investigation, and it can be easily argued that the Bureau’s evident determination to investigate Trump’s non-existent Russia ties meant no disclosure, true or false, would’ve convinced the agency to stop.
That the FBI was utterly determined irrespective of facts to damage Trump, first as a candidate, then as leader, has long-been clear, yet it has largely faded from public memory. One might argue it’s quite incredible that even the former president’s supporters have not invoked this dubious history in the wake of the Bureau’s raid on Mar-a-Lago, which bears clear hallmarks of being likewise politically motivated.
Evidence of the FBI’s anti-Trump agenda is amply available in black and white – so too the agency’s surging Russophobia. Two of the key Bureau figures central to the Trump-Russia probe, one-time lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, spelled this out both in public testimony and private text messages.
On the latter front, Strzok texted Page in July 2016 – right when the Trump-Russia probe was launched – to declare, “f*** the cheating motherf***ing Russians… bastards… I hate them… I think they’re probably the worst. F***ing conniving cheating savages.” He also pledged that the pair would together “stop” Trump from winning. Page was only slightly less foul-mouthed when she testified to Congress in July 2018:
“It is my opinion that with respect to Western ideals and who it is and what it is we stand for as Americans, Russia poses the most dangerous threat to that way of life.”
Quite why Strzok and Page, along with many other Bureau operatives, haven’t been prosecuted for their role in arguably the biggest US national security scam since the Iraq War isn’t clear.
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | September 16, 2022
Some of the world’s biggest tech companies and their social media platforms are ramping up censorship policies, once again under – this time public – pressure from the White House, as President Biden urged them to show accountability for what he said was spreading of hate and fueling of violence.
Biden addressed Big Tech in this way on Thursday, during a White House-hosted event – “United We Stand“- dubbed to be a summit dedicated to combating “hate-based violence,” particularly that targeting minorities or religious groups.
Addressing an audience made up of members of his administration, activists, and lawmakers, the president – who observers say is himself under political pressure to live up to the campaign promises regarding the handling of social media – also made a reference to Section 230, when he said that he believes special immunity for social media needs to be “gotten rid of” by Congress.
“And I’m calling on Congress to get rid of special immunity for social media companies and impose much stronger transparency requirements on all of them,” said Biden.
Reports say that both the remark about “holding social media accountable” and getting rid (of Section 230) were supported enthusiastically at the summit, with cheers and standing ovations.
The speech came shortly after the White House announced that Microsoft, Facebook (Meta), YouTube, and Amazon’s Twitch were all “updating” their rules in order to counter “hateful rhetoric” which is treated as violent extremism online.
The page set up for the summit detailed new actions to help prevent “hate-fueled violence” to be undertaken by various actors, including the federal government, and non-federal public and private institutions – among whom the Biden administration listed “commitments from the technology sector.”
YouTube said that it will add videos identified as extremist – for glorifying acts of violence in order to “inspire others or fundraise or recruit” – to its long list of content slated for censorship, and start removing these videos. And this will be happening regardless of whether content is linked to designated terrorist groups.
YouTube also committed to launch its educational media literacy campaign targeted at young users, that is supposed to help them recognize misinformation and manipulation by identifying “emotional language” and “cherry picking information.” This campaign will start in the US but according to the announcement, other countries will not be spared either.
Twitch is preparing to release a new tool that should counter “hate and harassment” by allowing streamers and communities to “further individualize the safety experience of their channels.” Twitch is also getting in the “educational” game with initiatives that are supposed to help communities identify misinformation, and “deter hateful violence.”
Microsoft said it will bake in what it calls online safety education into Minecraft via an “Education Edition” of the game, but more notably also deploy violence detection and prevention “AI” and machine learning (ML)- something eerily reminiscent of the concept of “pre-crime.” The White House announcement said there would be “appropriate” privacy protections.
And Microsoft also intends to sell “a basic, more affordable” version of these tools to schools and other organizations – cynics would say, should they show interest in detecting “pre-crime.”
Meanwhile, Meta is coming up with a research partnership with the Middlebury Institute of International Studies’ Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism.
The purpose would be to analyze violent extremism trends, but also tools that “help communities combat it.” Another partnership is in Meta’s future – with Search For Common Ground (a US-based NGO established by a former US Department of State diplomat). Here, Meta’s “community-based partners” will be provided with training and skill building in order to counter “hate-fueled violence.”
Whether or not any of these new announced rules and initiatives go beyond the declarative and may merely be produced to appease the Biden administration will become clear in time, if and when their effects are revealed in transparency reports.
What is of greater interest now is the stance of the White House toward Section 230, and the angle from which it is gunning for this decades-old legislation giving internet platforms, specifically social media, free rein in deciding which content to allow, while at the same time shielding them from legal liability given that this is user generated content.
Democrats have consistently claimed that Section 230, essentially, stands in the way of putting more pressure on Big Tech to censor content they don’t like.
Republicans, on the other hand, believe Section 230 gives Silicon Valley a “get out of jail free card” to censor conservative voices at will.
Samizdat – September 16, 2022
Facebook has been reporting users to the FBI’s domestic terrorism unit for nothing more than anti-authority sentiment, the New York Post reported on Wednesday, citing Justice Department (DOJ) sources.
“Facebook provides the FBI with private conversations which are protected by the First Amendment without any subpoena,” the sources claimed, explaining this is done “outside the legal process and without probable cause.”
Merely expressing concern about the legitimacy of the 2020 US election results was enough to get users flagged, they said.
Excerpts from those messages, often highlighting the “most egregious-sounding comments out of context,” were offered to nearby FBI field offices as “leads.”
Upon receiving them, the local offices could request subpoenas from their partner US attorney’s office in order to legally obtain the private messages they had already been shown by Facebook outside the legal process, the Post’s sources claimed.
None of the subsequent FBI investigations turned up any criminal or violent activity, the sources said.
“It was a waste of our time,” one source complained, describing a “frenzy” of subpoena requests and other activity over the last 19 months aimed at backing up the claims made by the administration of President Joe Biden about the threat posed by domestic terrorism in the aftermath of the January 6 Capitol riot.
The users targeted by Facebook for this kind of surveillance were all “gun-toting, red-blooded Americans who were angry after the election and shooting off their mouths and talking about staging protests,” the source said, adding there was “nothing criminal, nothing about violence or massacring or assassinating anyone.”
Facebook initially called the DOJ sources’ claims “false” before releasing a second statement to the Post an hour later characterizing them as “wrong,” insisting the company’s relationship with the FBI was “designed to protect people from harm” rather than to “proactively supply” law enforcement with the names of users expressing anti-government sentiment.
“We carefully scrutinize all government requests for user information to make sure they’re legally valid and narrowly tailored and we often push back,” Erica Sackin, a spokesperson for parent company Meta, said in the statement.
The FBI admitted it receives information “with investigative value” from social media providers and that it “maintains an ongoing dialogue to enable a quick exchange of threat information,” but would neither confirm nor deny the specific allegations made by the DOJ whistleblowers.
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | September 16, 2022
The Senate Homeland Security Committee questioned executives from social media companies about allowing “disinformation” to go viral.
Watch the hearing here.
Former executives from these companies appeared during the hearings and accused their former employers of allowing misinformation to spread because it has more user engagement.
Committee chair Senator Gary Peters (a Democrat from Michigan) told Twitter, Meta, YouTube, and TikTok that by pushing “the most engaging posts to more users, they end up amplifying extremist, dangerous, and radicalizing content. This includes QAnon, Stop the Steal, and other conspiracy theories, as well as white supremacist and anti-Semitic rhetoric.”
Last September, a former Facebook employee, turned 🛡“whistleblower,” claimed that the company allows “disinformation” to spread to boost growth and called for more censorship.
During the hearing, former head engineer at Twitter, Alex Roetter, said that social media companies do not want to rein in disinformation because it is profitable.
“Regulators must understand these companies’ incentives, culture, and internal processes to fully appreciate how resistant they will be to changing the status quo that has been so lucrative for them,” he said.
Roetter went on to say that Twitter uses an experimental system to test how to get the most engagement from users.
“This system logs a slew of data for every live experiment,” he said. “Teams use this data to show per-experiment effects on various user and revenue metrics. Noticeably absent were any values tracking impacts on trust and safety metrics.”
Former vice president for product engineering, marketing, strategic operations, and analytics at Facebook, Brian Boland, testified about his former employer prioritizing user engagement. He said that Facebook acquired CrowdTangle, a company that provided “industry-leading transparency” into the platform’s newsfeed content. The company showed that Facebook was amplifying political and racial divisions in 2020. According to Boland, Meta “attempted to delegitimize the CrowdTangle-generated data.”
“What finally convinced me that it was time to leave was that despite growing evidence that the newsfeed may be causing harm globally, the focus on and investments in safety remained small and siloed,” Boland said. “Rather than address the serious issues raised by its own research, Meta leadership chooses growing the company over keeping more people safe.”
Boland also noted that Facebook disbanded its Responsible Innovation team last week. He added that social media companies should be regulated because their algorithms will only get better at targeting vulnerable users.
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | November 5, 2013
Groupthink: A pattern of thought charaterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics.
Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets, by Roland Benabou, published in the Review of Economic Studies. Benabou also has a talk (ppt slides) on this subject.
First, a definition of groupthink (from the ppt slides):
Janis (1972)’s eight symptoms [of groupthink]:
Sound like any groups that we know? … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
Aletho News 