‘Free Speech’: Trump Campaign Defends WikiLeaks’ Release of Hacked DNC Emails
Sputnik – 11.10.2018
A lawsuit filed in September by two donors and an ex-employee from the Democratic Party alleged that President Donald Trump’s team had purportedly conspired with Russia to release emails ostensibly stolen from the servers of the Democratic National Committee.
In a motion to dismiss a new lawsuit, the Trump campaign, represented by lawyers from the firm Jones Day, turned to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to state that WikiLeaks couldn’t be held “liable” for publishing Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails because the whistleblowing website served as an “intermediary” for other parties’ information.
“A website that provides a forum where ‘third parties can post information’ is not liable for the third party’s posted information. Since WikiLeaks provided a forum for a third party (the unnamed “Russian actors”) to publish content developed by that third party (the hacked emails), it cannot be held liable for the publication,” the motion read.
Presenting the 32-page legal filing, the lawyers also maintained that any alleged agreement between the website and the Trump campaign to leak those emails couldn’t be considered a “conspiracy” due to the fact that WikiLeaks’ posting of the messages was not a crime, while a “conspiracy is an agreement to commit an unlawful act,” the lawyers claimed.
They further added that the campaign couldn’t be held legally responsible for the publication of the DNC emails on WikiLeaks.
The lawyers appealed to the First Amendment, which protects the right to “disclose information – even stolen information – so long as (1) the speaker did not participate in the theft and (2) the information deals with matters of public concern.”
“At a minimum, privacy cannot justify suppressing true speech during a political campaign. The First Amendment ‘has its fullest and most urgent application to speech uttered during a campaign for political office’. It leaves voters ‘free to obtain information from diverse sources in order to determine how to cast their votes,’” the filing read.
The motion was submitted in response to a civil lawsuit brought against the Trump campaign by one ex-employee from the Democratic Party and two donors, who alleged that the leaked emails had revealed “identifying information.”
While the Trump campaign’s lawyers leapt to the defense of the website in their brief, the current administration has previously blasted WikiLeaks for releasing classified documents, with then-CIA director Mike Pompeo – now the secretary of state – dismissing the platform as a “hostile non-state intelligence service” in 2017.
In July 2018, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the investigation into the alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election, announced indictments against 12 Russian nationals, claiming that they were posing as Guccifer 2.0, the entity that took credit for the hack of the DNC.
According to the indictment, they used a website run by an organization, “that had previously posted documents stolen from US persons, entities, and the US government,” in an apparent allusion to WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks, which was accused by Trump’s Democratic rival in the election, Hillary Clinton, of acting as a “fully owned subsidiary of Russian intelligence” after publishing emails leaked from the DNC servers during the campaign, has denied any efforts to meddle in the 2016 election in the United States, as well as conspiring with Russia.
Both Washington and Moscow have repeatedly dismissed claims of collusion to influence the outcome of the vote.
Berlin Refuses to Name Sources Claiming GRU’s Cyberattacks in Europe
Sputnik – October 11, 2018
BERLIN – German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer claimed on Thursday that facts likely suggested that the Russian military intelligence service was involved in a series of alleged cyberattacks across Europe, however, the minister did not specify what sources provided such information.
“We believe that facts and analytical information likely point to the fact that the military [intelligence service] GRU is the source [of the attacks]. I ask for your understanding given the fact that we are not going to make public the sources that led us to these facts and conclusions,” Seehofer said.
On October 4, the United Kingdom claimed that the Russian military’s Main Intelligence Directorate was “almost certainly” responsible for a series of cyberattacks targeting political institutions, media outlets, and companies across the world.
On the same day, the Dutch Defense Ministry claimed that Russian intelligence services had diverted a cyberattack against the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), whose headquarters are situated in the Dutch city of Hague, allegedly attempted by four Russian citizens holding diplomatic passports.The Russian Foreign Ministry refuted the allegations, saying that the claims were a part of yet another act of propaganda and that “anti-Russia spy mania campaign” negatively affected bilateral relations.
Canada and the United States later joined the allegations against GRU, accusing seven Russian military intelligence officials of targeting with cyberattacks the US electoral system, a US nuclear power company, and anti-doping agencies.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said that Washington “poisoned” the relations between the two countries with those allegations.
Britain is More of a Fake State than Anything Else
By Grete Mautner – New Eastern Outlook – 11.10.2018
Blatant lies have been a feature of the British political system for a long while. Whitehall’s tried and tested ways of manipulating the general public are used to distract attention from crucial topics. But what’s even more curious is that inside the Whitehall bunkers where they come up with their own definitions for such manipulations, there is even a term for this kind of propaganda. They call it a ‘term of art’.
That would hardly be a surprise if one is to recall that modern British oligarchies have grown out of yesterday’s slave owners and high seas pirates, for whom deception was nothing but a tool of their trade. We must not forget that millions of people died in the wars unleashed by the United Kingdom. One can recall that only a handful of native Tasmanians escaped being slaughtered by the English in the 19th century. In less that two decades of British military presence in Bengal, the population of the region had decreased by almost 20 million people – which constitutes more than a half of the indigenous population of the region. The absolute majority of wars Anglo-Saxons unleashed over the course of the last two centuries began with a provocation and then were sold to the UK population together with an extensive amount of military hysteria in the media.
And it doesn’t seem that things have changed much in the ways that London operates on the international stage, as it carries on voicing its dubious accusations against Moscow for its alleged involvement in the Salisbury incident. Previously, it would try to prevent British sports fans from traveling to Russia to attend FIFA World Cup 2018 by claiming that it was a terrible and dangerous place to visit. For sure, those accusations were proven wrong by those fans who dared to make a trip but no apologies was offered to Russia by London.
But why bother with presenting facts before voicing any actual accusations, if the Telegraph could as well announce that the chief executive of BP was poisoned in a plot believed to have been orchestrated by the Russian security services.
To provide this publication with some air of credibility, the media would present “revelations” made by the former employee of BP Illya Zaslavsky, who announced that Russian elites wanted to remove Bob Dudley from the position of group chief executive of BP by “slow poisoning” him with foods. The only problem with Zaslavsky’s claims is that Dudley himself is perfectly healthy and he keeps working in close cooperation with Russia. As a matter of fact, after visiting Moscow last February, Dudley described his contacts with Russia’s Rosneft as exceptional, in spite of the aggravation of geopolitical tensions in the world.
In its bid to provide British citizens with even more fake information, the Guardian would in turn run an article full of allegations that Moscow was somehow discussing with representatives of Julian Assange its assistance in his escape plan. However, these claims haven’t been confirmed by anyone just as well.
However, British media sources are not the only ones who are engaged in disinformation campaigns, as British foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt has recently told the Sky News that he he had a “tough” discussion with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on the margins of a United Nations summit in New York. According to Hunt, he hinted to Lavrov that there’s a high chance of a direct military confrontation between Russia and the UK, while adding that Moscow would pay a high diplomatic price for its alleged wrongdoings. The only problem with those claims is that there was no direct meeting between Lavrov and Hunt during the recent UN Summit in New York, which was officially confirmed by the Russian foreign ministry.
But should we be surprised by the obsession of British elites with all things fake, if The Queen Elizabeth II has a fake hand waving machine for when her arm gets tired at royal engagements. So it must be of little surprise to anyone that to support its lies the British government employs thousands of people directly in propaganda and related activities to distort and deceive.
But, frankly, if you’re going to start wars using fake pretexts you could as well fight it with fake weapons. Thus, the British-made ADE 651 tool, that London urges others to use to scan personal belongings of jihadists must be allegedly helping explosives specialists to detect all sorts of explosives and precious metals from a fairly long distance using a telescopic antenna. However, it’s unlikely that the actual device has any electronic boards inside it – at the very best, its an imitation of a scanner. But this did not prevent Britain from pushing this product on the international market at a price tag of 60 thousand dollars a pop. The government of Iraq, in particular, has acquired more than 1,500 units of ADE 651 for the needs of its federal police and the military, since those bodies are engaged in heavy counter-terrorist activities at all times. ADE 651 is the brainchild of the British company ATSC, and its inventor James McCormick is currently serving ten years in prison. To make the matters worse, militants of various terrorist organizations are aware of the properties of this British know-how and keep mocking Iraqi law enforcement agencies for the acquisition of this device.
As it’s been recently reported by a professor of sociology at the University of Bath and ESRC, David Miller, the UK office for national statistics, for 2017, show that the number of people who work in “communication” in central government departments, executive agencies and non departmental public bodies, totals 3,450. It is clear that these figures are an underestimate for a variety of reasons. For example the 490 employed in the ministry of defence seems not to cover the media people in the armed services themselves. In 2007, for example, the total ministry of defence complement was reported as as over 1,000, but this “excludes many military personnel involved in communications work”.
Also not in the figures – as the ONS has confirmed – are the unknown numbers that work for the intelligence agencies. Both MI5 and MI6 most likely have sizable staff groups working on propaganda, whether ‘communication’ is in their formal job title or not. The contemporary period is indeed one in which many more people than in the previous two decades are more confident about existing outside the ‘filter bubble’ conjured up by the government, the spooks and the mainstream media.
Grete Mautner is an independent researcher and journalist from Germany.
Lady Justice Sits Down With a Stiff Drink to Consider Her Next Career Move
By Rob Slane | The Blog Mire | October 10, 2018
I am currently in the U.S., and so watching from afar as the biggest criminal investigation Britain has ever seen is sub-contracted out to the Atlantic Council/Soros-sponsored website, Bellingcat. Pinch yourself once. Pinch yourself twice. Yes, it really is happening.
It is truly remarkable that having seen millions of pounds spent on an investigation which has failed to give consistent and logical answers to some of the biggest questions in the case, and which has been remarkably economical with the actualité on things like timelines, a website with dubious connections to various neo-conservative organisations has now ridden to the rescue to fill in the gaps which The Met has apparently missed (as an aside neo-conservative is of course a misnomer, since they don’t actually conserve anything. They are in reality neo-Trotskyists, since they are globalists and like destroying stuff). Any taxpayers out there feel like a refund?
The media seems to be having a field day quoting Bellingcat as if it were now the official mouthpiece of The Metropolitan Police and the Government. Of course it may well be the official mouthpiece, only we can’t quite tell as The Met and HMG sneakily hide behind the claims instead of either confirming or denying them:
“A spokesman for the Home Office said it would not comment as it was a police investigation.”
“The Metropolitan Police said they would not comment on the ‘speculation’.”
“And Lady Justice said she would not comment on the case anymore, because she’s had enough and needs to sit down in a corner of a darkened room with a stiff drink, before considering what her next career move might be.”
I have no intention of being sucked into the black hole of analysing the Bellingcat claims. I have no idea of the validity of their claims. They may well be correct. They may well not. However, as I have pointed out many times before, the case against the two suspects is not that they were undercover intelligence officers; rather, it is that they carried out an assassination attempt at the front door of 47 Christie Miller Road using something called “Novichok”. And I am only really interested in whether that case does, or does not stack up.
Reading through the charges made against the two men again, which were given in the statement put out by The Metropolitan Police on 5th September, it strikes me as fairly obvious that investigators do not actually have the evidence of the men’s culpability that they claimed to have when they said:
“We now have sufficient evidence to bring charges in relation to the attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury.”
Why do I say this? Because although Mr Basu stated that he would go through their movements “in detail”, in actual fact he did nothing of the sort. Take a look at what he said about their movements on Saturday 3rd March:
“On Saturday, 3 March, they left the hotel and took the underground to Waterloo station, arriving at approximately 11.45am, where they caught a train to Salisbury, arriving at approximately 2.25pm. They are believed to have taken a similar route when they returned to London on the afternoon of Saturday, 3 March. Leaving Salisbury at approximately 4.10pm and arriving in Bow at approximately 8.05 pm.”
Question: How much detail did he actually give about their movements in Salisbury that day? The answer is none at all. Read it again. There’s nothing. Yes, there’s a lot of fluff about their movements in London, but other than the fact that they arrived in Salisbury, and then left Salisbury, there is nothing whatsoever about their movements whilst they were there. And just to remind you, the charge against the men relates to what they did in Salisbury, not in London.
Why is this and what does it indicate?
Well, it isn’t that they don’t have evidence of the movements of the two men. One of the commenters here, Peter, has established via a Freedom of Information request to Wiltshire Council that all CCTV cameras were operational on both days, and that all footage in relation to the March incident was handed over to the Counter-Terrorism Police.
This means that The Met has detailed footage of the two men in Salisbury on 3rd March, but not only have they chosen to release none of it, apart from one still image of the men at Salisbury station heading back to London, but they have also declined to give any actual detail of the men’s movements in the town that day. Surely if the footage exists — which it does — then The Met ought to be able to tell us what the two men were doing and where they went. But the extraordinary thing is, not only did they fail to do this, but they actually appealed for help in establishing their movements:
“We’d also like to hear from anyone who saw them while they were in the UK between Friday, 2 March and Sunday, 4 March. We are particularly interested in establishing as much as possible about their movements during the period 2pm to 4.30pm on Saturday, 3 March, and 11.30am to 2pm on Sunday, 4 March.”
Why would they need help when plenty of CCTV exists for them to be able to trace their movements?
Actually, it gets worse. Despite the existence of CCTV showing the men’s movements, but still apparently not knowing where the men went, The Met felt fit to draw the following conclusion:
“We assess that this trip was for reconnaissance of the Salisbury area and do not believe that there was any risk to the public from their movements on this day.”
Reconnaissance? What on earth is this supposed to mean? Did they go and check out Mr Skripal’s house that day? If so, where is the CCTV footage of them doing so? Presumably there would be footage of them walking past the Shell garage on that day too. Where, then, is it (and again, I’m asking for footage, not a still image)?
The use of the word reconnaissance is simply absurd. It makes it sound like they were involved in some clandestine military operation, behind enemy lines, checking out the lie of the land. But actually they were in the rather genteel city of Salisbury, and could have checked their destination using Google maps. Or were they just checking that the door had a handle?
Let’s see how The Met fares on the Sunday:
On Sunday, 4 March, they made the same journey from the hotel, again using the underground from Bow to Waterloo station at approximately 8.05am, before continuing their journey by train to Salisbury. CCTV shows them in the vicinity of Mr Skripal’s house and we believe that they contaminated the front door with Novichok. They left Salisbury and returned to Waterloo Station, arriving at approximately 4.45pm and boarded the London Underground at approximately 6.30pm to London Heathrow Airport.”
Again, most of this is fluff. What has their journey from their hotel to Waterloo got to do with what they are charged with doing in Salisbury? What has their return journey to Waterloo and on to Heathrow got to do with what they are charged with doing in Salisbury? Not much. The charge against them is that they carried out an assassination attempt in Salisbury, not that they got on a train here, a tube there, and an airplane somewhere else.
Ah but they do mention what happened in Salisbury, don’t they? Well, yes they do, but as I pointed out in my previous piece, it’s actually a deeply misleading claim. The CCTV footage released by The Met does not show the men in the vicinity of Mr Skripal’s house; it shows them on a different street altogether, hundreds of yards away.
The entirety of the evidence given verbally by Mr Basu of the two men’s activities in Salisbury on both the 3rd and 4th March, is therefore this:
“CCTV shows them in the vicinity of Mr Skripal’s house and we believe that they contaminated the front door with Novichok.”
That’s it! Nothing more! Not exactly compelling, is it?
But here’s the thing: The Met knows exactly where the men went on both days, because it has an awful lot of CCTV footage showing where they went. Yet not only does it refuse to release footage, but it skips out all details of Saturday’s Salisbury wanderings, and makes a misleading statement about the Sunday wanderings. I would submit that the most plausible explanation for this is not that the CCTV doesn’t exist (it does). Nor is it that it exists, but is deemed too sensitive to be released (it isn’t). Rather, the most plausible explanation is that it does exist, but it doesn’t actually back up the claims being made.
Even if the Bellingcat claims turn out to be true, it doesn’t alter this crucial point: The Metropolitan Police has so far failed to provide any convincing evidence that the two suspects they have named walked up to 47 Christie Miller Road and placed “Novichok” on the door handle. They have CCTV footage of the men in Salisbury on 3rd and 4th March. And yet the actual details of their movements that they have given out are in reality non-existent. Perhaps Bellingcat would like to answer the question of why this is. Since they appear to have taken over the investigation, that is.
Benjamin Netanyahu Is No Friend to America
By Scott Ritter | TruthDig | October 4, 2018
Benjamin Netanyahu is no stranger to the American spotlight. A career Israeli politician who attended school in the United States, he specializes in the kind of rhetoric that his American counterparts revel in—a kind of narcissism that’s more used car salesman than educator.
Netanyahu specializes in selling danger to the American people. This is an art he has practiced on numerous occasions, whether it be at the gatherings of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), his many appearances before the U.S. Congress, at televised events or during the general debate in the United Nations General Assembly, an annual gathering of global leaders and diplomats where each nation’s representative is provided the opportunity to address counterparts and the world on issues he or she deems to be of particular import.
Bibi (as he is known, affectionately or otherwise) delivered his latest address to the General Assembly on Sept. 27. Like others he had delivered previously, this one was a tour de force of angst, fear and anger with a nearly singular focus on the issue that has seized Netanyahu for more than two decades—Iran and its alleged nuclear weapons program.
In his 1995 campaign autobiography, “Fighting Terrorism,” Netanyahu, preparing to run for the office of prime minister of Israel, asserted that Iran was “three to five years” away from having a nuclear bomb. Bibi repeated this claim several times over the next 20-plus years, apparently unconcerned by the fact that his self-appointed timetable kept coming and going without the Iranian nuclear threat manifesting itself.
In September 2002, when he briefly found himself a private citizen, Netanyahu shifted his aim to Iraq, which he confidently asserted had a nuclear weapons program as he touted the benefits of removing Saddam Hussein from power—this during so-called “expert” testimony before the U.S. Congress. He was wrong on both counts, a fact that seems to slip the minds of those who continue to assign him a semblance of credibility given his proximity to Israel’s vaunted intelligence service.
As someone who spent four years (from 1994 to 1998) working closely with Israel’s intelligence service to uncover the truth about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs, I can attest that Israeli intelligence is better than most at what it does, but far from perfect. For every good lead the Israelis delivered to the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), for which I was working at the time, they provided a dozen or more that did not pan out. Their detailed analysis about the alleged organization and structure of Iraq’s covert nuclear program proved to be far removed from the truth. They got names wrong, affiliations wrong, locations wrong—in short, the Israelis made the exact same mistakes as any other intelligence service.
Iraq was a denied area, made less so by the presence of UNSCOM weapons inspectors like me who had unprecedented access to the most sensitive national security sites in the country. And still the Israelis got it wrong. They did so not because of “bad intelligence,” but because they, like the CIA and other intelligence agencies around the world, were privy to the vast amount of information and data collected by UNSCOM inspectors about the true state of Iraq’s proscribed weapons and related programs. They suffered from the same lack of imagination as did the others that postulated a nuclear-armed Iraq circa 2002, unwilling to consider the possibility that Saddam Hussein might be telling the truth about not having retained any weapons and related capabilities prohibited by the Security Council resolution. This same lack of imagination appears to fuel Netanyahu’s increasingly wild claims about Iran.
It is no secret that Netanyahu has opposed the Iran nuclear deal—officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action, or JCPOA—since the possibility of a negotiated solution to the stand-off between Iran and the rest of the world was put on the table by the Obama administration in 2012. He lobbied hard against the agreement, interjecting himself in American domestic politics in an unprecedented fashion to undermine the negotiations.
When Donald Trump won the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Netanyahu found a kindred spirit whose intellectual curiosity would not permit any effective challenge to the narrative constructed by the Israeli prime minister. And when Trump faced resistance from his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and his national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, he simply replaced them with more compliant persons, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton respectively.
Trump’s decision to withdraw from the JCPOA was facilitated not by any supporting brief from the U.S. intelligence community, which held fast to the assessment that Iran was fully compliant with its obligations under the JCPOA, but rather by intel provided by Israel that featured wild claims of an operation in the heart of Tehran; hundreds of thousands of documents purported to outline a nuclear program that Iran insisted did not exist. In April 2018, Bibi unveiled the existence of what he termed Iran’s “Atomic Archive” as he detailed some of its contents, allegedly recovered during an Israeli operation.
While Netanyahu’s dramatic presentation proved to be enough to help push Trump into withdrawing from the JCPOA the following month, it failed to convince the rest of the world that Iran was operating in bad faith when it came to declaring the totality of its nuclear program. One of the main reasons for this is that the tale put forward by Bibi simply didn’t add up. Documents he presented as being derived from the newly captured archive were recognized by officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—which, along with supporting governments, is responsible for implementing the JCPOA—as matching those presented to the agency more than a decade ago. That cache of documents was allegedly recovered from a laptop computer sourced to an Iranian opposition group by Israeli intelligence.
At best, there is nothing new in these materials, and all the underlying issues alleged to have been “exposed” had already been discussed and rectified by the IAEA and Iran prior to the rectification of the JCPOA. At worst, Netanyahu was lying about the Israeli intelligence operation, and simply recycling old material—which may have been manufactured by Israel to begin with back in 2004—simply to provide political cover for Donald Trump.
Netanyahu spent much of his Sept. 27 address before the General Assembly detailing an alleged “Atomic Warehouse,” supposedly uncovered by Israeli intelligence in the heart of Tehran. As was the case with the “Atomic Archive” facility, Netanyahu made grand claims about Iranian malfeasance: The site contained “15 ship containers full of nuclear-related equipment and material,” along with “15 kilograms of radioactive material” that Iran allegedly evacuated from the site to evade detection. (Netanyahu seems to have overlooked the fact that the U.S. Department of Energy, prior to the JCPOA and in anticipation of such a scenario, “evacuated” nuclear material from one of its facilities during an exercise, only to have evidence of its existence uncovered by inspectors wielding the same detection capabilities as the IAEA.)
Netanyahu alleged that Iran was maintaining both an “Atomic Archive” and an “Atomic Warehouse” so that it could reconstitute its nuclear weapons program when the “time is right,” ostensibly when the sunset clauses of the JCPOA, which limit the number of centrifuges Iran can operate, expire. As with the “Atomic Archive” story, however, outside of Trump and his inner circle of anti-Iranian acolytes, informed American officials aren’t buying the Israeli leader’s tale, noting that Netanyahu has exaggerated the scope and scale of the warehouse in question. (These officials claim that the “material” being stored there is documentary in nature, a far cry from the “equipment” claimed by Netanyahu.)
Netanyahu bemoaned the fact that the world was promised “anywhere, anytime” inspections in Iran, and yet the IAEA has failed to take any steps to investigate the revelations provided by Israel. The reality is that the JCPOA promised no such thing. “Anywhere, anytime” was an artificial construct cobbled together by opponents of the deal by denigrating the investigatory capabilities of the IAEA. Moreover, the IAEA is intimately familiar with the quality of the intelligence information provided by Israel in the past, having spent months with Iran carefully deconstructing the claims contained within. The agency is hesitant to fall victim to Israeli exaggerations and falsifications again, and rightfully so.
More importantly, the JCPOA has a detailed mechanism in place to investigate claims such as those put forth by Israel. But by precipitously withdrawing from the JCPOA, the Trump administration has removed itself from that process. This means that Israel would need to turn to the Europeans, Russians or Chinese to plead its case. And the fact that neither France nor Germany nor the United Kingdom has picked up the mantle of Israel’s claims points to the inherent weakness of its intelligence. Netanyahu may be able to play siren to Trump’s Ulysses in order to crash America’s ship onto Iranian shoals, but the rest of the world is not following suit.
The American people should not tolerate this continued intrusion into their affairs by an outsider whose previous lies, prevarications and provocations helped get the United States entangled in one war, all the while advocating for our involvement in another. Bibi Netanyahu has a problem with telling the truth, and we give power to his words and deeds by not calling him out for what he truly is—a habitual liar with the blood of thousands of our fellow citizens on his hands. Netanyahu claims he is a friend of the American people. He is, in fact, the furthest thing from it.
Scott Ritter is the author of “Dealbreaker: Donald Trump and the Unmaking of the Iran Nuclear Deal,” published by Clarity Press, October 2018.
Omidyar’s Intercept Teams Up with War-Propaganda Firm Bellingcat
By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | October 8, 2018
The Intercept, along with its parent company First Look Media, recently hosted a workshop for pro-war, Google-funded organization Bellingcat in New York. The workshop, which cost $2,500 per person to attend and lasted five days, aimed to instruct participants in how to perform investigations using “open source” tools — with Bellingcat’s past, controversial investigations for use as case studies. The exact details of what occurred during the workshop have not been made public and Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins declined to elaborate on the workshop when pressed on social media.
The decision on the part of The Intercept is particularly troubling given that the publication has long been associated with the track records of its founding members, such as Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald, who have long been promoted as important “progressive” and “anti-war” voices in the U.S. media landscape.
Greenwald publicly distanced himself from the decision to host the workshop, stating on Twitter that he was not involved in making that decision and that — if he had been — it was not one “that I would have made.” However, he stopped short of condemning the decision.
Bellingcat’s open support for foreign military intervention and tendency to promote NATO/U.S. war propaganda are unsurprising when one considers how the group is funded and the groups with which it regularly collaborates.
For instance, Bellingcat regularly works with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which – according to the late journalist Robert Parry – “engages in ‘investigative journalism’ that usually goes after governments that have fallen into disfavor with the United States and then are singled out for accusations of corruption.” OCCRP is notably funded by USAID and the controversial George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations.
In addition, Bellingcat’s founder Eliot Higgins is employed by the Atlantic Council, which is partially funded by the U.S. State Department, NATO and U.S. weapons manufacturers. It should come as little surprise then that the results of Bellingcat’s “findings” often fit neatly with narratives promoted by NATO and the U.S. government despite their poor track record in terms of accuracy.
Bellingcat’s funding is even more telling than its professional associations. Indeed, despite promoting itself as an “independent” and open-source investigation site, Bellingcat has received a significant portion of its funding from Google, which is also one of the most powerful U.S. military contractors and whose rise to prominence was directly aided by the CIA.
Google has also been actively promoting regime change in countries like Syria, a policy that Bellingcat also promotes. As one example, leaked emails between Jared Cohen, former director of Google Ideas (now Jigsaw), and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revealed that Google developed software aimed at assisting al-Qaeda and other Syrian opposition groups in boosting their ranks. Furthermore, Cohen was once described by Stratfor intelligence analysts as a “loose cannon” for his deep involvement in Middle Eastern regime-change efforts.
Under President Donald Trump, Google’s connections to the U.S. government have become even more powerful, as the current Trump-appointed Director of National Intelligence once worked as a corporate lobbyist for Google.
Synergy in the service of empire
Given the clear alliances between Bellingcat and the military-industrial complex, The Intercept’s decision to host a Bellingcat workshop in its New York offices may seem surprising. However, The Intercept has long promoted Bellingcat in its written work and its parent company has actually been associated with Bellingcat since 2015.
Indeed, Google-owned YouTube announced in 2015 the formation of the “First Draft coalition,” which nominally sought to bring “together a group of thought leaders and pioneers in social media journalism to create educational resources on how to verify eyewitness media.” That coalition united Bellingcat with the now-defunct Reported.ly – another venture of The Intercept’s parent company, First Look Media.
In the years since, The Intercept has repeatedly promoted Bellingcat in its articles, having called the Atlantic Council-connected, Google-funded group “a reputable U.K.-based organization devoted to analyzing images coming out of conflict zones.” Furthermore, prior to the recent workshop in late September between The Intercept and Bellingcat, both jointly participated in another workshop hosted in London earlier this year in April.
Omidyar’s connections
In addition, the Intercept’s main funder – eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar – shares innumerable connections to the U.S. government and has helped fund regime-change operations abroad in the past, suggesting a likely reason behind the publication’s willingness to associate itself with Bellingcat.
For instance, Omidyar made more visits to the Obama White House between 2009 and 2013 than Google’s Eric Schmidt, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. He also donated $30 million to the Clinton global initiative and directly co-invested with the State Department — funding groups, some of them overtly fascist, that worked to overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected government in 2014.
Even after Obama left office, Omidyar has continued to fund USAID, particularly its overseas program aimed at “advancing U.S. national security interests” abroad. Omidyar’s Ulupono Initiative also cosponsors one of the Pentagon’s most important contractor expos, a direct link between Omidyar initiatives and the U.S. military-industrial complex.
Such promotion of the regime-change wars has been reflected in reporting done at The Intercept, particularly in regards to Syria. Indeed, Intercept writers covering Syria frequently promote Syrian “rebels” and the opposition while also promoting pro-regime-change talking points.
Another former Intercept contributor and now Intercept “fact checker,” Mariam Elba, wrote a poorly researched article that sought to link the Syrian government to U.S. white nationalists, claiming that the Syrian government sought to “homogenize” the country despite its support for religious and ethnic minorities in stark contrast to the Syrian opposition. Notably, Elba recently praised the Intercept/Bellingcat workshop, which she had attended.
If that weren’t enough, last year the paper hired Maryam Saleh, a journalist who has called Shia Muslims “dogs” and has taken to Twitter in the past to downplay the role of the U.S. coalition in airstrikes in Syria. Saleh also has ties to the U.S.-financed propaganda group Kafranbel Media Center, which also has close relations with the terrorist group Ahrar al-Sham.
Furthermore, MintPress noted last year that The Intercept had withheld a key document from the Edward Snowden cache proving the Syrian opposition was taking marching orders from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Intercept published that document only after the U.S. State Department itself began to report more honestly on the nature of these so-called “rebels,” even though The Intercept had had that document in its possession since 2013.
Even “anti-interventionist” Intercept journalists like Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald have come under fire this past year for allegedly promoting inaccurate statements that supported pro-regime-change narratives in Syria, particularly in regards to an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma. That attack is now widely believed to have been staged by the White Helmets.
Thus, while The Intercept has long publicly promoted itself as an anti-interventionist and progressive media outlet, it is becoming clearer that – largely thanks to its ties to Omidyar – it is increasingly an organization that has more in common with Bellingcat, a group that launders NATO and U.S. propaganda and disguises it as “independent” and “investigative journalism.”
Author’s Note | John Helsby contributed research, particularly in regards to social media, to this report.
Editors Note: After objection from Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins, this story was updated to read: “The exact details of what occurred during the workshop have not been made public”, This was updated from the original: “The details of the workshop have not been made public” as Higgins interpreted this to mean details made prior to the event. MintPress was well aware of the pre-event details that were made public prior to the workshop, such as cost to attend, date and location as a link that the announcement of those details can be found in the second sentence of the article, which remains unchanged.
Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and a contributor to Ben Swann’s Truth in Media. Her work has appeared on Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has also made radio and TV appearances on RT and Sputnik. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.
Moscow Doesn’t Plan to Create Stronghold in Libya – Russian Embassy in UK
Sputnik – October 9, 2018
LONDON – The Russian Embassy in London on Tuesday refuted reports claiming that Moscow was allegedly plotting to get control over European immigration routes in Libya and establish a stronghold against the West.
“This publication has nothing to do with reality. We are treating it as a new attempt to shift the responsibility for the ruined country and destroyed lives of millions of Libyans on Russia which had no relation to the 2011 NATO military intervention which grossly violated the whole range of UN Security Council resolutions,” a representative of the embassy told reporters.
The embassy added that Russia supported peacemaking efforts in Libya and never planned any military intervention.
“We fully respect the UN Security Council Resolution 1970 which imposed an arms embargo on Libya,” the mission representative said.
On Monday, The Sun reported that the UK intelligence had warned UK Prime Minister Theresa May of Moscow’s alleged plans to send weapons and troops to Libya to turn it into “new Syria” and take control of migration routes to Europe thus increasing Moscow’s influence on the West.
Russia calls for the parties to the Libyan conflict to engage in a constructive dialogue on political settlement as the only way to end the crisis, the embassy concluded.
Libya has been in turmoil since the overthrow of its long-time leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. The country is divided between two governments, with the eastern part controlled by the Libyan National Army and the western part governed by the UN-backed Government of National Accord of Prime Minister Fayez Sarraj.
Libya is also the major gate for migrants from all of the North Africa attempting to cross the Mediterranean and settle in Europe.
IPCC Pretends the Scientific Publishing Crisis Doesn’t Exist
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | October 8, 2018
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a press release today. It tells us the IPCC assesses “thousands of scientific papers published each year,” and that its latest report relies on “more than 6,000 references.”
That sounds impressive until one remembers that academic publishing is in the grips of a reproducibility crisis. A disturbing percentage of the research published in medicine, economics, computer science, psychology, and other fields simply doesn’t stand up. Whenever independent third parties attempt to reproduce/replicate this work – carrying out the same research in order to achieve the same findings – the success rate is dismal.
The influential 2005 paper, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, is now very old news. Headlines declaring that ‘science is broken’ have become commonplace. In 2015, the editor-in-chief of The Lancet declared that “much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.”
So here’s the bottom line: We know that studies about promising drugs typically fail when strangers attempt to reproduce those studies. We know that flashy physics research published in Science and Nature has been wholly fraudulent. We know that half of economics papers can’t be replicated, even with assistance from their own authors. We know political bias distorts the peer-review process in psychology. (All of this is discussed in a report I wrote in 2016).
We therefore have no earthly reason to imagine that climate science is exempt from these kinds of problems.
If half of the scientific literature is untrue, it therefore follows that half of climate research is also untrue.
This means that 3,000 of the IPCC’s 6,000 references aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.
…
BACKGROUND: The IPCC is a UN bureaucracy. Governments select scientists to write climate reports – one of which has just been completed.
These scientists are further asked to summarize their work. But the scientist-crafted summary is only a draft. At the meeting that just ended in South Korea, the draft was re-written by politicians, diplomats, and bureaucrats representing the political establishments of various countries.
At that point, the summary forfeited any conceivable claim to be a scientific document and became, instead, a politically-negotiated statement.
Today’s press release announces that the politicized summary was “approved by governments” and has therefore been made public (download it here).
Please note: the report itself has not been made public. Nor has the draft summary containing the scientists’ own words. (Although the IPCC claims to be ultra-transparent, its website says the original/draft version of the Summary for Policymakers is available only to “authorised users” such as government officials.)
This is the IPCC’s standard MO. It controls the message by feeding the media a politically-negotiated Summary of its latest work. Then it stands back and lets gullible reporters mislead the public about what the science says.
LINKS:
The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert
- read the IPCC’s press release here
- my previous commentary: 3 Things Scientists Need to Know About the IPCC
- Where’s the Science at the IPCC?
- The Sneaky, Not-So-Secret Purpose of the IPCC
- BBC Ignores Widely Publicized IPCC Problems
- The BBC’s Naive View of the UN’s Climate Machine
- If IPCC Meetings Were Televised
- US Scientific Integrity Rules Repudiate the UN Climate Process
- Cogs in the Climate Machine
- The IPCC as UN Funding Mechanism
The Claim That CCTV Shows the Salisbury Poisoning Suspects in the Vicinity of Mr Skripal’s House is Deeply Misleading
By Rob Slane | The Blog Mire | October 7, 2018
The images and timeline released by the Metropolitan Police on September 5th, when they formally accused two men of the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal, contain a number of problems and oddities. These include:
- The fact that very few of the images have the original timestamps on them, but rather have the Metropolitan Police’s own timings.
- The fact that there is an unaccounted for, yet vital, 42 minutes between the image of the men at the entrance to Summerlock Approach (said to be 13:08), and the image of the men at the train station (said to be at 13:50:56). Why is this vital? Because it not only takes just 5 minutes, rather than 42 to get from the one location to the other, but also because it potentially places the men within a few minutes walk of Sergei and Yulia Skripal within that 42 minute timeframe.
- The fact that only stills were released, rather than actual footage (public appeals for witnesses involving CCTV usually show actual footage – why not in this case?).
But there is one crucial image which I would like to focus your attention on: CCTV Image 5 (at the top of this piece). This is one of the few pictures that is properly timestamped (11:58:48), although I have to say I’m highly sceptical that the two men could have got to that location by that time, given that The Met says they were at the station at 11:48:20. It takes over 12 minutes at a quick walk, and so unless they ran some of the way (and neither picture gives the impression that they are in a particular hurry), I think it highly likely that one or other of these times is incorrect.
The reason this image is particularly crucial is that it is the only image shown to the public, which can be said to connect the men (albeit extremely tenuously) to the claim made against them by the Met. None of the other images do this at all.
If I happened to be a juror at the trial of these two men, and I was presented with the other images, my reaction would largely be “so what?” (this is of course pure fantasy, since the Blair Government, in its infinite wisdom, tore up centuries of legal practice to allow such trials to be held without a jury on the grounds of that mindless buzz phrase, “national security”). Here are some images showing them entering and leaving the UK. So what! Here are some images of them arriving in and departing from Salisbury. So what? Here are some images of them walking around the town. Actually, this one is not so much a “so what?”; more a “hang on a minute, are you telling me they went walkies around the town after allegedly carrying out the most audacious (and stupid) assassination attempt ever seen in Britain?”
Without the Wilton Road image, none of these other images would mean diddly squat. That image, assuming it to be authentic, is the closest The Met comes to backing up its claim against them. But as we shall see, it actually turns out to be no more convincing than the others.
As I said in my previous piece, it is crucial to understand what the claim being made by The Met against the two men actually is. Here goes:
“That between approximately 12:10pm and 12:40pm on 4th March, the two men named as suspects – Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov – walked up to the house of Sergei Skripal at 47 Christie Miller Road, Salisbury, and there applied a high purity, military grade nerve agent to the handle of the front door in an attempt to assassinate Mr Skripal.”
(Note: see the previous piece if you want to know why there is a 12:10-12:40pm window).
Now let’s turn back to the statement made by The Met on 5th September. This is what they said:
“CCTV shows them in the vicinity of Mr Skripal’s house and we believe that they contaminated the front door with Novichok.”
The big question that arises from this claim is this: What is this CCTV footage, which apparently shows them in the vicinity of Mr Skripal’s house? There are two basic possibilities:
Firstly, it could be that there is indeed CCTV that shows them close to Mr Skripal’s house (i.e. within a few yards of it), and perhaps which even shows them applying something to the door handle.
Secondly, it could be that The Met is simply referring to the CCTV of the men on the Wilton Road, which they released in the statement.
The second is almost certainly the case, for the following reasons:
- If there is CCTV footage of the two men near (or at least nearer the house), why not show that rather than the Wilton Road image?
- If such footage does exist, why does The Met only “believe” that the two men contaminated the door handle with something called “Novichok” as opposed to “know” that they did so (note: Porton Down does not call it “Novichok”, but rather “a Novichok or related agent”)?
- When you read The Met’s statement of 5th September, it is fairly clear that the reason the Wilton Road image is there, is that it is precisely this image which is being used to back up the statement about the men being in the vicinity of the house (i.e. they say: “Image five shows the suspects ten minutes later – at 11.58 – on Wilton Road, Salisbury, we say, moments before the attack”).
This is deeply misleading. The Shell garage on the Wilton Road could plausibly be said to be in the vicinity of 47 Christie Miller Road if we were talking about the two locations in terms of Salisbury as a whole. But it can in no way be said to be “in the vicinity” of 47 Christie Miller Road, if it is being spoken of in connection with a highly specific claim about an assassination attempt at the door of the house. The claim is that they were at the door. The image, assuming its authenticity, shows them on a different street, many hundreds of yards away.
This sort of sloppiness and looseness has been the hallmark of the investigation from day one, and has been the reason why so many have come to treat the official claims with scepticism.
Let me caveat this, however, by saying that I don’t believe Boshirov’s and Petrov’s claims either. The chief reason for this is that The Met says they arrived in Salisbury at 14:25 on the Saturday, and this was not disputed by them in their interview with Margarita Simonyan. What they did claim, however, is that they came to visit Stonehenge, but were unable to do so due to the bad weather. This was kind of true. Stonehenge was indeed closed that day due to bad weather. However, had it opened that day, it would have closed at 17:00 with last admissions at 15:00. Getting to Salisbury at 14:25 with the hope of then going to see Stonehenge by 15:00 is not very plausible — even if it had been good weather.
But as I’ve said previously, it is largely irrelevant whether Boshirov’s and Petrov’s account is credible. It is The Met that has accused them, and it is therefore for The Met to come up with credible evidence to back up their claim. Showing an image of the two men in broad daylight, on a completely different street, hundreds of yards away from the alleged crime scene, does not do it. Worse still, claiming that this image “shows them in the vicinity of Mr Skripal’s house” — which it manifestly does not — is deeply misleading.
If The Met has more conclusive footage (footage that is, not another still), actually showing the two men in the vicinity of the house, they should release it. Until they do, we can assume the claim that “CCTV shows them in the vicinity of Mr Skripal’s house” is referring to the Shell garage on the Wilton Road, which since it is not in fact in the vicinity of the house, is misleading. We can therefore continue to treat their claims with the scepticism that they have so far deserved, and to believe that there is another explanation altogether for Boshirov’s and Petrov’s two Salisbury trips; an explanation that neither the British or Russian Government seem very eager to come clean on.
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From the Archives
“Democratic Institutions?” – 10 Lessons from history that will destroy your trust in the CIA
By Kit | OffGuardian | July 20, 2018
… At every corner, we are urged to simply believe what we are told. Whether it is about believing Porton Down and MI6 about “novichok”, or believing the White Helmets about Sarin, or believing the FBI about “collusion”, we are presented with no facts, just assertions from authority. Those who question those assertions are deemed “bots” at best or “traitors” at worst.
Well here, fellow traitors, are the Top Ten reasons to question anything and everything the CIA – or any intelligence agency – has ever told you. … Read full article
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