Anyone who watches the news knows that Russian hackers gave Democratic National Committee documents to WikiLeaks and hacked voter databases in 21 states. Prominent Democrats call these shenanigans “a political Pearl Harbor.”
On the blog Daily Kos, one contributor cries “we were robbed!” (arguing that somehow Russian meddling gave Trump a victory in North Carolina, where his margin was 180,000, and where no evidence whatsoever indicates a successful hack of voter databases).
In a new video propamentary, er, docuganda, or something like that, Morgan Freeman declares “we have been attacked. We are at war. This is no movie script.”
Before we hop on the Morgan Freeman train, we might want to consider some history. In 1898, the American press — taking the word of naval investigators — reported that a Spanish mine had destroyed the battleship, U.S.S. Maine. Leading newspapers promptly called for war, and the U.S. government obliged.
Finally, the U.S. became an imperial power with the acquisition of Cuba and the Philippines and a few other odds and ends, at the bargain cost of 2,500 American soldiers dead, plus another 4,000 lost in the Filipino rebellion that followed, not to mention the lives of tens of thousands of Filipino opposition fighters. Only later did it come to light that the Maine was destroyed by a boiler explosion.
In 1915, leading newspapers again whipped up the American public by announcing that a German submarine had sunk the unarmed passenger ship, Lusitania. Two years later — and in part due to lingering outrage over the Lusitania — the U.S. went to war, this time costing 116,000 American lives and over 200,000 wounded, not to mention creating a patriotic frenzy at home that led to beatings, lynchings, and attacks on civil liberties. Decades later, divers proved that the Lusitania was carrying arms to Britain — contrary to government assurances — thus violating international law. German naval intelligence had proved correct.
In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed he had a list of men in the State Department who were communists. A credulous press played up his accusations, despite the fact that the numbers on his supposed list kept shifting. McCarthy and his allies in Congress recklessly charged Americans in Hollywood and in government with being either communists or “fellow travelers,” often ruining their careers.
Congress meanwhile passed the McCarran Internal Security Act, which required suspected “subversives” to register with the government. It also permitted the government to round up and hold those same suspected “subversives” on the order of the President. McCarthy, of course, had no real list, and finally ruined his own reputation by accusing Army brass of communist sympathies. McCarthy’s many allies, however, paid no penalty for overreach.
Fake Intelligence
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson announced that the North Vietnamese had attempted a second torpedo attack on an American destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin, then used the incident to get Congress to give him the power to make war.
Thanks to the press endorsing the war effort and cheerleading on the nightly news (at least until the Tet Offensive four years later), the Vietnam War led to 58,000 American deaths and over a million war deaths altogether. Covert U.S. forces, meanwhile, kick-started a civil war in Cambodia that ended in genocide after the Khmer Rouge took power. Cambodia lost over half of its population of 7 million between 1970 and 1980.
It later became clear that there had been no second attack on the destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin; its crew had misread radar signals.
In 2002, U.S. intelligence, via George W. Bush’s administration, told the American public that Iraq had a hand in planning the 9/11 attacks and, moreover, that Iraq secretly maintained an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that might be shared with Al Qaeda. Both claims were utterly false, yet the American press — particularly the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN — led Americans to believe they were true. Far from questioning authority, the press became its servant. The result: 4,500 American war deaths; at least 110,000 Iraqi deaths (some estimates put the figure at over a million); and a destabilized Middle East, wherein both Iran and ISIS (who are bitter enemies) were empowered. In all likelihood, moreover, there would have been no Syrian war had there been no Iraq War.
When the American press and American political leaders loudly accuse another country of “an act of war,” in short, the American public needs to be on the alert. Rather than marginalizing and belittling skeptics, the press and public should give them a fair hearing. Far better to have a spirited debate now than to come to the realization in the future that groupthink created catastrophe.
Hack or Leak? It’s Worth Asking
With all that history in mind, we should be grateful that William Binney, the National Security Agency’s former technical director, is shouting with everything he can muster that the U.S. intelligence community has no solid evidence that Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee. The NSA, he says, would have a record of any overseas exfiltration and could release that data without danger to national security; yet the NSA hasn’t. Though Binney left the NSA 16 years ago, he should know: he created the powerful cyber-vacuum that the NSA still uses.
Binney’s organization, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), has produced a report in which they argue that forensic evidence from documents produced by Guccifer 2.0 (G2) suggests — strongly — that G2 was a hoaxer. Skip Folden, a VIPS associate and a former elite tech executive with IBM, has issued his own report that buttresses the VIPS report. Adam Carter (a pseudonymous investigator) and Forensicator (another pseudonymous investigator) have also buttressed the VIPS Report, as have cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr and former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter (Ritter disagrees with VIPS in part but not on the basic charge of insufficient evidence).
To the extent they mention the skeptics, American journalists dismiss them as fringe. Yet the skeptics deserve a hearing. Among the important points they make is that U.S. intelligence has only identified the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups (APT 28 and 29 to be precise) associated with the hacking, and not the hackers themselves. An APT is a set of common parameters — tools, modes of operation, target patterns — used by hackers. But how certain are our intelligence agencies that Russians stand behind APT 28/29?
It happens that Dimitri Alperovitch of CrowdStrike — the cybersecurity entity that analyzed DNC servers — was asked that question in June 2016. His answer: “medium-level of confidence that FancyBear is [Russian intelligence agency] GRU… low-level of confidence that CozyBear is [Russian intelligence agency] FSB.”
Skip Folden suggests that Alperovitch’s estimates equal a 37-38 percent probability that Russian intelligence stands behind APT 28/29. It’s not clear how Folden came up with that figure. We should note here that Alperovitch subsequently raised his confidence levels to “high,” but then had to reduce them again in March 2017 after realizing that his new assessment was based on phony data published by a Russian blogger. Meanwhile, in January, Director of National of Intelligence James Clapper’s hand-picked team had used Alperovitch’s “high confidence” assessment of Russian hacking of the DNC, which every major network reported dutifully without so much as a blink.
It’s hard to say what additional evidence the NSA/CIA team might have had — or whether there was any — though there are rumors that a Kremlin mole working for Latvia confirmed that Putin ordered his cyber-warriors into action. The NSA, however, didn’t consider the source fully trustworthy (remember Curveball, the wonderful gift of German intelligence?), hence it committed itself to only “moderate confidence” even as the CIA stated “high confidence.” At any rate, the January report lacked both solid technical evidence and more traditional evidence confirming Russian hacking.
Not Making Sense
Several other oddities stand out: first, why would G2 announce himself two days after the DNC reported being hacked, brag he was the hacker, and add that he had given his material to WikiLeaks? WikiLeaks exists for one reason: to give whistleblowers deniability. Normally, people don’t give material to WikiLeaks and then brag about it publicly.
Least of all would Russian intelligence do such a thing, assuming — as some allege — that they routinely use WikiLeaks to disseminate hacked data. Why would Russia implicate its proxy? Why, indeed, would Russia not only cast aspersions on Julian Assange’s honesty, but also cast doubt on the authenticity of the DNC data, given that intelligence services are known to doctor hacked documents? Why, moreover, would G2 give information to WikiLeaks in the first place, given that he had the ability to curate it and disseminate it on his own, as he showed by distributing “choice” (but actually innocuous) data to journalists?
Then there’s the forensic evidence, which shows that (1) G2 put DNC documents into a Russian template; and (2) G2 made those changes on the computer in an East Coast U.S. time zone. Plus, linguistic evidence suggests that G2 showed none of the typical speech idiosyncrasies of a native Russian speaker.
Metadata can be fudged, so it’s possible that (1) and (2) don’t matter. If that is the case, however, one must explain why G2 would drop deliberate clues indicating that he’s Russian — including leaving the name of the founder of the Soviet secret police in one document, along with Cyrillic error messages in another — while also dropping deliberate clues indicating he’s an American leaker. Tricky indeed.
Then there’s another important piece of forensic evidence: the transfer speed, which corresponds to the speed of a download to a local thumb drive rather than to an overseas exfiltration. Critics — including a few VIPS dissenters — promptly insisted that the VIPS report was wrong to assume that such speeds could not be attained in an overseas exfiltration in 2016. Signers of the original VIPS report, however, subsequently conducted multiple experiments to prove or disprove that hypothesis; not once did they achieve a transfer speed anywhere close to that indicated in the DNC metadata.
Critics have also argued that the DNC documents transfer speed may refer to a download to a thumb drive after the initial hack, yet the download would nevertheless have had to have been done on the East Coast of the U.S., since transfer speed metadata correlate to time stamp data. Why would a hacker exfiltrate data to Romania or Russia, then return to the U.S. to download the material to a thumb drive?
Inconsistencies and Uncertainties
The above inconsistencies, I should add, apply to the DNC data, not the Podesta emails. No one, so far as I know, has cast doubt on the theory that the Podesta emails were phished via APT 28. Still, the same rules of caution apply. As Alperovitch himself testified in June 2016, APT 28 does not necessarily prove Russia involvement, and even if it did, no one has proven that Russians gave the Podesta emails to WikiLeaks. There are many other possibilities.
The Wall Street Journal, for instance, reported that Republican operatives were desperately reaching out to the hacking community to locate Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 missing emails. They made contact with several hacking groups including some that claimed to have the emails and even sent samples. The Republicans told the hackers to turn over the emails to WikiLeaks, but — supposedly — offered no payment. It’s not inconceivable, however, that the same Republican dirt-diggers — or others — indeed did pay hackers to turn over materials to WikiLeaks. Even if that occurred, however, the hackers might well have been non-state actors who occasionally work with Russian intelligence, but who otherwise work independently (more on that later), and who were not under orders from Putin. Or, they may have been hackers who have no connection to Russia whatsoever.
Regarding Roger Stone’s infamous remark that “it will soon be Podesta’s time in the barrel,” which has been cited as proof that Stone had foreknowledge of WikiLeaks’ publication of Podesta’s emails, Stone explained on Tuesday that he was referring to his own research on Podesta’s consulting work for foreign governments in the context of similar complaints being lodged against Stone’s friend and Trump’s erstwhile campaign manager Paul Manafort.
Questioning the Investigation
There are worrisome implications here. First, if we are “at war with Russia”; if the hacking was “the crime of the century”; if it’s “bigger than Watergate”; why didn’t the FBI examine the DNC server, given that James Comey admitted that was “best practice”? Why did he rely on CrowdStrike’s analysis, especially given CrowdStrike’s strong ties to the Atlantic Council (created solely to support NATO and heavily funded by foreign entities) and CrowdStrike’s grossly mistaken charges of Russian hacking in other contexts?
Second, why has there been no comprehensive or coordinated Intelligence Community Assessment or a full-scale National Intelligence Estimate — weighing evidence of Russian culpability against contrary theories — by the U.S. intelligence community, given that it has known about alleged Russian election hacking of both the DNC and state voter databases for well over a year?
What we got in January was a hurried intelligence assessment put together by a “hand-picked” team from three agencies, not a consensus of “17 agencies,” as the U.S. press wrongly blared for months. If Russia had committed an “act of war,” then surely President Obama would have ordered the fullest assessment of intelligence that the U.S. is capable of producing; yet he didn’t.
Third, why would Putin order an enormous campaign against Hillary Clinton, knowing that she would very likely win anyway (and did win the popular vote). Would Putin risk the likelihood of President Hillary Clinton finding out about his shenanigans? What implications would that have for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act, for additional sanctions, for Syria, for Ukraine, for NATO funding, for the possibility of renewed Cold War? Perhaps — as James Comey contends — Putin hated Clinton so much that he was willing to play “Russian roulette.” Yet one wonders.
Has the Press Fed Hysteria?
Why, moreover, has the U.S. press barely mentioned the fact that U.S. intelligence services — and the press itself — wrongly accused Russia of the Macron hack? France’s head of cyber intelligence, after finding no evidence of Russian hacking, said this: “Why did [NSA Director Michael] Rogers say that, like that, at that time? It really surprised me. It really surprised my European allies. And to be totally frank, when I spoke about it to my NSA counterparts and asked why did he say that, they didn’t really know how to reply either.”
Think about those words for a moment; they were not meant to be diplomatic. They were unabashedly chastening.
Why, too, has the U.S. press barely mentioned the fact that German intelligence, after a months-long investigation, found no Russian meddling in its recent election (and moreover, found that the supposed Russian hack of the Bundestag in 2015 was likely a leak after all), despite U.S. intelligence agencies’ insistence that Germany was Russia’s next target?
Why do we not hear that Britain found no evidence of Russian efforts to influence Brexit, despite allegations to that effect? Why has the U.S. press wrongly reported a Russian hack of a Vermont utility; a Russian hack of an Illinois water pump; a Russian hack of north Texas voter rolls; a Russian hack of Qatari news media? Add to those examples the latest round of debunkings: there was no Russian attempt to hack Wisconsin voter rolls, nor any Russian attempt to hack California’s. Despite all the debunked stories, the U.S. press eagerly reports new Russia-done-it stories every time some anonymous source breathes a leak.
Here’s a test you can do at home: Type “Germany Russia hacking” into your search engine and see what comes up. Then type “Brexit Russia hacking.” Then try “France Russia hacking.” You’ll get an absolute barrage of stories — hundreds of links — that melodramatically attest to Russian hacking and/or meddling in all three situations, but you’ll struggle mightily to find stories refuting those charges.
One can readily see why some curious soul sitting at home who takes it upon himself to do a little internet research would come away utterly convinced of Russian perfidy. Google here becomes an instrument not of truth-finding, but of algorithmic fake news.
Why, too, did former Assistant Secretary of Department of Homeland Security for Cybersecurity, Andy Ozment, insist in September 2016 that hacking attempts on voter rolls were not of Russian origin, but rather were criminal attempts to steal identification data for sale on the dark net? Why did DHS say as late as October that they lacked evidence to blame Russians? Were they simply protecting the nation against mass hysteria that could cast doubt on the presidential vote?
And yet the basic evidence pattern for attributing the attempted hacks to Russia (or anyone else) hasn’t changed; it’s not as if some new damning piece of evidence emerged after September. Even Reality Winner’s leaked NSA document from June 2017 notes uncertainty about the identity of the hackers. If one looks at the leaked chart showing details of the flow of hacked information, one notes that the final arrow on the left pointing to Russian intelligence (GRU) is marked “probably.” Click here and scroll down to see the blown-up chart.
Incidentally, if you think the case of Reality Winner is a bit suspect — i.e., a cleverish ruse to undermine The Intercept (publisher of the “Winner leak”) and puff up the Russia hysteria — you might want to check out this story. I withhold judgment, personally.
What I Am Arguing
Am I implicating Obama in a conspiracy? No way. Am I suggesting that G2 was a DNC actor seeking to blame Russia for a damaging insider leak to Assange? Not necessarily, but not “not necessarily,” either. There is reason for suspicion at least.
Am I suggesting that U.S. intelligence agencies are lying in order to protect massive U.S. funding for NATO and to force Russia to loosen its ties to Iran and Syria, not to mention lay off Ukraine? No, I am not suggesting any deliberate lie, though yes, wishes can father thoughts. Certainly Trump’s campaign talk of defunding NATO, friendship with Russia, and leaving Syria to Assad ruffled feathers in the intelligence community.
I am far from being a cyber-security expert, let alone knowledgeable about IT, so I write all this in modesty. And yet I find myself agreeing with experts who say that APT associations are not grounds for “high confidence” intelligence assessments, and that the American public deserves to see strong evidence not just of hacking — but of actual Russian hacking — given the magnitude of the issue.
I also find myself agreeing with cyber-security experts who tell us that U.S. intelligence agencies — as well as private cyber-security firms like CrowdStrike — tend to build the evidence around hypotheses, rather than letting the evidence lead to its own conclusions.
I don’t think there’s a conspiracy; I think there’s bias, groupthink, and boss-pleasing — in both the press and the intelligence agencies — just as there was in the Iraq WMD fiasco.
As Folden points out, there are numerous international crime organizations (an $800 billion industry last year) that might well stand behind APT 28/29. Given the sloppiness of the DNC and Podesta hacks (assuming they were hacks), what’s probable is that Russia isn’t doing the work directly, but might be paying a third party that sells its wares to bidders. Or, perhaps Russia isn’t involved.
As Folden notes, numerous states and international crime organizations have strong economic and/or strategic interests in both internal U.S. campaign information and in U.S. elections outcomes. The same observation goes for allegations of hacked voter databases. Any number of entities have both the wherewithal to employ APT 28/29 and an economic interest in harvesting voter identification data.
We should pause to note here that almost all the state database attacks were just that — attacks — not breaches. Unsuccessful attacks cannot be traced to APT groups, only to IP addresses, which are highly unreliable evidence. What few confirmed breaches there were (e.g., Illinois), moreover, did not change election results, and — as with the alleged DNC hack — can only be traced to APTs, not to actual hackers.
Here’s an aside just for fun: why would Russian hackers imagine for a second they could turn Illinois into a Trump state? Clinton won that state by a million votes. Sure, one can understand why Russians might want to meddle with voter roles in a swing state, but Illinois? More likely the hackers were criminals seeking voter identification info, which is precisely why they downloaded 90,000 registration records. The FBI absurdly claimed that Russians needed all those records to figure out precisely how Illinois voter registration works, thus to improve their dirty work. Really? They needed 90,000 records for that?
Pressuring Facebook
Of course, if the voter database attacks turn out to be no-big-deal, the press still will find some new way to exploit the Russia hysteria. The Washington Post and the New York Times — along with the House and Senate Intelligence Committees — are now investigating Russian attempts to use Facebook ads and posts to help Trump win the election. Facebook — thanks to subpoenas from Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and pressure from congressional Democrats — has turned up $100,000 of suspicious ad buys from phony accounts.
Think of that for a moment: Russians (supposedly) mustered fully $100,000 for ads in a presidential campaign that cost $2.4 billion. Talk about bang for your buck! The current allegation is that over the past three years, a few hundred Russian trolls armed with $100,000 and 470 Facebook accounts (compared to Facebook’s $27 billion in annual revenue and 2 billion monthly users) deployed issues ads (not primarily attack ads against specific candidates) to out-brigade millions of ordinary Americans who posted campaign pieces on Facebook every day, not to mention Clinton’s public relations army.
Poor David Brock paid a million dollars for his own pro-Clinton troll brigade, but they were children compared to these nefarious Russians. It’s a feat right up there with Xenophon’s Anabasis … a tiny force of foreigners, slashing their way through the Persian hordes! Someone get an epic poet!
Of course Sen. Mark Warner, a hawkish vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, informs us that the $100,000 is just the “tip of the iceberg.” Who knows, maybe the Russians spent $200,000.
Even if these propaganda charges turn out to be 100 percent true — and even if the Russians were clever enough to target voters in the Upper Midwest — it is highly unlikely that they had more influence on the election than a host of other factors, ranging from Clinton’s bad campaign decisions to emailgate to anti-establishment fervor to Trump’s 4-Chan volunteers (did he really need several hundred Russians? Surely he had plenty of home-grown trolls).
Silencing Dissent
So, maybe the Russians did play some small role on Facebook — though I suspect this suspicion, too, will be challenged — but should we therefore conclude that we’re at war, as Morgan Freeman declares? Should we demand that Facebook and Google continue to rework algorithms to shut down posts or ads deemed pro-Russian? Doesn’t that remind anyone of the anti-German hysteria — and censorship — during World War I?
Should we demand, moreover, that the tiny Russian-owned media outlet RT register as a foreign agent — as the Atlantic Council has insisted, and as the Justice Department is now demanding — but not require the same of the BBC and CBC, which are financed by the British and Canadian governments respectively?
What about the Atlantic Council itself, which, receives much of its funding from foreign nations that seek to strengthen NATO? Should the Atlantic Council be required to register as a foreign agent? Does anyone seriously think the Atlantic Council doesn’t propagandize for NATO and for hawkish policies more generally? Or what about the hawkish Brookings Institution, or a host of other think tanks that welcome money from foreign powers?
The unspoken assumption here is that only Russia propagandizes; no other nation is so shifty. Surely Saudi Arabia wouldn’t do such a thing, nor Israel, nor Ukraine, nor countless other nations that seek to influence American policy. After all, they have their paid lobbyists and press buddies working for them every day; they don’t need several hundred trolls.
Let’s be honest, we live in a world in which foreign powers seek to influence American public opinion, just as we seek to influence public opinion in other nations. Which brings to mind a bill that President Obama signed in December, at the outset of the Russia hysteria: “The Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act,” which created the State Department’s “Global Engagement Center,” which seeks to “recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United Sates national security interests.”
The act also offers grants to organizations (think news agencies and research groups) that promise to “counter efforts by foreign entities to use disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda to influence the policies and social and political stability” of the U.S. and allied nations. (Shout out to Rob Reiner; did you apply for one of those grants? Might be a good opportunity for you.)
Does no one see a problem with this? What exactly is foreign propaganda? Is it RT’s occasional charges that the U.S. press treats Trump unfairly? Is it RT’s penchant for left-wing, anti-establishment commentary, e.g., Chris Hedges, Thom Hartmann, and Lee Camp? Our intelligence elites certainly think so, judging from the seven pages they dedicated to RT’s supposed rascally programming in the January intelligence assessment.
And what exactly will it mean to “counter … foreign … disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda”? Will it mean countering any news or commentary deemed anti-NATO or pro-Russian? Any news or commentary deemed pro-Iranian? How exactly will our government define “foreign propaganda”? How, moreover, will it define “national security”? What lengths will it take to deny the American public — not to mention foreigners — access to legitimate opinions?
Alien and Sedition Acts
Perhaps the real analogue here isn’t World War I after all, but the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Of course it wasn’t Russians that President John Adams worried about; it was hot-blooded Irish radicals and French émigrés with their revolutionary idealism, which was ostensibly corrupting the nation. Ordinary Americans were suddenly refusing to vote for their Federalist political betters, and those betters determined to make them pay. Far better to jail Jeffersonian editors and drive out foreigners than to let them endanger America’s “national security.”
We are forsooth reliving the age of Hamilton, I fear, when political elites dance to Wall Street theatricals about anti-democrats while feeling virtuous about opposing “deplorables.” Just don’t expect them to care about free speech. Thanks to our government’s push against so-called fake news, both Google and Facebook have already altered algorithms to such an extent that they have pushed down readership for one old progressive venue, AlterNet, by fully 40 percent (other progressive venues have seen similar declines), thus starving them for ad revenue. Meanwhile neoconservative researchers are trumpeting inch-deep investigations into supposed Russian propagandizing that — thanks to vast funding — may get churned out for years to come.
Let’s not kid ourselves; this project isn’t about shutting down “fake news.” From the moment the Washington Post ran its infamous PropOrNot story in November 2016, the message has been clear: the real threat isn’t Russians, it’s any media outlet that fuels anti-establishment politics.
The Universality of Hacking
All that said, it is still very possible that CrowdStrike and the intelligence community are correct to attribute at least some DNC exfiltration of data to Russians or to loose-leashed teams working as subcontractors, or, alternatively, criminal organizations that sometimes answer to Russia. The one thing that the skeptics (of whom I am obviously one) have not answered is why the CrowdStrike investigation found uniquely modified X-TUNNEL source code in DNC servers, which would seem to have been created for this particular hack.
Since I don’t have years to become a cyber-security expert, I’ll leave the technical experts to further argue that question. However, I am left to wonder whether X-TUNNEL indeed betrays a Russian hack of at least some DNC emails, but that another party altogether — a leaker — was nevertheless responsible for handing the full complement of DNC documents to Wikileaks.
None of the skeptics are claiming that the Russians for certain didn’t hack the DNC (which wouldn’t be that surprising, really; we probably hack their political entities, too). The skeptics are only claiming that G2 was an insider who downloaded documents onto a thumb drive. Both claims can be true.
I’ll add — just to be clear — that I am quite certain that the U.S. intelligence community is correct that the Russian government is engaged in broad hacking attempts aimed at targets all over the world, many of them associated with APT 28/29. But that doesn’t mean they carried out the particular hacks at issue here (or, at least, it doesn’t mean that Russian state actors were behind the WikiLeaks releases, or the attacks on state databases).
And it certainly doesn’t mean — contrary to what over-wrought bloggers claim — that Russians changed 2016 vote tallies. The answer isn’t to shout “war” and create hysteria; the answer is to secure U.S. infrastructure.
I’ll also add that even “high confidence” that Russia hacked the DNC, Podesta, and/or state databases is insufficient grounds for aggressive policy — e.g., harsh sanctions and diplomatic ejections, not to mention military action — let alone grounds for announcing “we are at war.” Suppose for the sake of argument that “high confidence” is 75 percent probability. Would we convict an accused murderer on 75 percent probability?
If we did that — and if the accused were then put to death — we would be knowingly killing 25 innocents out of every 100 we adjudge. The same logic should apply to foreign policy. We should not be taking punitive measures unless we can assess culpability with greater certitude, else we risk harming millions of people who had no role in the original crime.
Where We Stand
It seems to me that we are in uncharted waters. Not everyone can be a cyber-security expert; we must trust those who are. And yet in doing so, we put enormous powers into the hands of unelected technocrats with their own biases and agendas. As others have noted, moreover, the cyber-war community is at odds with the cyber-security community.
On the one hand, intelligence operatives are constantly developing new tools to exploit cyber vulnerabilities of other nations and criminal actors. On the other hand, cyber-security people (e.g., DHS) seek to patch those same vulnerabilities to protect U.S. infrastructure. The problem is that the people who know how to exploit the vulnerabilities don’t want to report those vulnerabilities because it means years of work down the drain. Why make your tools obsolete?
We need to resolve these contradictions in favor of security, not cyberwar.
I cannot say this loudly enough. This whole episode isn’t just about Hillary Clinton losing the election, or Russian hacking of the DNC, or Deep State bias and boss-pleasing. The upshot is that we are entering a cyber-arms race that is going to become ever more byzantine, hidden, and dangerous to democracy, not just because elections can be stolen, but because in guarding against that, we are handing over power to unelected technocrats and shutting down dissenting speech. We are entering a new era; this won’t be the last time that hacking enters political discourse.
We might already be in the midst of a cyber Cold War, though the American public has no idea — flat zero — what sort of offensive gamesmanship our own cyber-warriors are engaging in. (One interesting theory: The Russians deliberately implicated themselves in the DNC hack in order to send a warning to U.S. cyber-warriors: we can play dirty, too).
Presumably not even our cyber-security experts at the DHS and FBI know what the CIA and NSA’s cyber-warriors are up to. Thus Russian hacking becomes “Pearl Harbor” rather than an unsurprising reciprocal response. Both the State Department and the CIA, after all, have been in the foreign propaganda business for decades; the American public, however, has not the vaguest idea of what they do.
We might also be on the brink of something else nightmarish: an international cyber-war with multiple parties participating — attacking one another while no-one-knows-who-did-what.
The intelligence community’s whispered “trust us, we’re the experts” simply isn’t good enough. If we don’t demand hard evidence, then we’re following the same path we took in 1898, 1915, 1950, 1964, and 2003. Let’s not go there.
Daniel Herman is Professor of History at Central Washington University. He specializes in American cultural history and the American West.
September 29, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | Atlantic Council, Brookings Institution, CIA, DNC, Google, NATO, United States |
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Media Matters published an article Wednesday with the provocative title “How Matt Drudge became the pipeline for Russian propaganda.” The explanation offered in the article for the title’s grand claim, however, would be convincing only to someone who has no familiarity with what the Drudge Report, founded and edited by Matt Drudge, is.
Here is the argument made in the article for how the Drudge Report is a Russian propaganda pipeline:
Drudge has for years used his site as a web traffic pipeline for Russian propaganda sites, directing his massive audience to nearly 400 stories from RT.com and fellow Russian-government-run English-language news sites SputnikNews.com and TASS.com since the beginning of 2012, according to a Media Matters review. Those numbers spiked in 2016, when Drudge collectively linked to the three sites 122 times.
It may seem like the people at Media Matters are onto something until you consider how the Drudge Report website works. It is a news aggregating website that, on its homepage, presents many phrases or even single words in hypertext. Click on one of the hypertext items and you immediately access a linked article, video, image, or other information at its own website. Also, these hypertext items, and the information linked from them, at the Drudge Report change frequently so the website can maintain its popularity as a source for breaking and up-to-date information.
Looking at the Drudge Report on Monday morning, I counted 60 such hypertext items linking to information at many websites. If I look at the Drudge Report tomorrow, I can expect to see a similar number of such hypertext items, with many or even the majority of them new.
In this context, the number of links to three websites with a connection to the Russia government that the Media Matters article asserts have been present on the Drudge Report provides no indication of any Russian propaganda pipeline. Instead, it just indicates that the Drudge Report includes these websites among the many websites to which it links.
If Media Matters’ numbers are correct, the Drudge Report’s linking to these websites is sparing, especially considering how many links cycle through the website. Nearly 400 links in a little over five and a half years amounts to about one link every five days. The so-called spike to 122 such links Media Matters claims were at the Drudge Report in 2016 amounts to about one link every three days in that year.
The Drudge Report is a pipeline for current events information from a variety of sources. But, the portion of the information in that pipeline that the Media Matters article asserts is Russian propaganda amounts to a trickle at most.
September 29, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | Media Matters, United States |
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“Russian operatives used Facebook ads to exploit America’s racial and religious divisions,” the Washington Post claims in a September 25 headline.
Over at The Daily Beast, Dean Obeidallah explains “How Russian Hackers Used My Face to Sabotage Our Politics and Elect Trump.”
And US Senator James Lankford (R-OK) thinks that “the Russians and their troll farms” (as opposed to Donald Trump and professional football players) are behind the current “take a knee” kerfuffle between Donald Trump and professional football players.
Because, you know, Americans never had rowdy disagreements with each other over race and religion until last year, and wouldn’t be having them now if not for those dirty, no-good Russian hackers who stole the 2016 presidential election from the second most hated candidate in history, on behalf of the most hated candidate in history, operating through subterfuge to achieve the outcome that some of us predicted months in advance, long before anyone mentioned Russian hackers.*
Evidence? Who needs evidence? The people who hated the outcome and have been railing against it for nearly a year now have told us what happened, and why, and whodunit, and they’d never lie to us about something like that, would they? They lied about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, and about illegal wiretapping by the NSA, and about a thousand other things, but THIS is DIFFERENT.
Keep in mind that when all the most wild and baseless accusations (e.g. that !THEM RUSSIANS! hacked the voting machines) are discarded, the basic claim remaining is this: By spreading “fake news” through social media, !THEM RUSSIANS! fooled a bunch of Americans into voting the wrong way.
Let’s assume for a moment that the basic claim is true, although so far the actual evidence indicates a tiny propaganda operation in the scale of things. If it’s true, the conclusion it points to is:
American voters are morons who can be gamed into doing anything by anyone with the ability to buy ads on Facebook and Twitter.
I didn’t say that. Russian hackers didn’t say that, at least in public. That’s what the propagators of the new Red Scare are claiming.
If the American electorate is really as abjectly stupid as the “blame the Russians” crowd insists, it seems to me that instead of blaming the Russians, they should get to work on either making the electorate smarter or coming up with a system that doesn’t leave important political decisions in the hands of the gullible. Just sayin’ …
*In May of 2016, I predicted that Donald Trump would carry every state Mitt Romney carried in 2012, plus Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. I didn’t predict Wisconsin and Iowa, but 48 of 50 states from six months out ain’t too shabby, is it?
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
September 29, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | United States |
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As US lawmakers demand social media companies show how their platforms were allegedly used by Russia to meddle in the 2016 election, WikiLeaks co-founder tweeted emails that show Facebook executives in direct communication with one candidate’s team.
Beginning on October 7 last year, WikiLeaks published hundreds of emails from the private account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta. The daily drops continued for a couple days after the November 8 election.
On Thursday, as US media were speculating about “Russian” meddling on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, Julian Assange tweeted some of the Podesta emails with a reminder that the social network’s leading lights were Clinton fans.
In an email from early January 2016, Podesta wrote to Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, saying that he was excited to work with her on getting Clinton elected.
“Look forward to working with you to elect the first woman President of the United States,” Podesta wrote. Sandberg replied she was “thrilled” by the progress that Clinton was making.
In February 2015, Podesta was copied on an email from Clinton aide Cheryl Mills, who said she had arranged for Sandberg and her researcher to visit the office and “step through the research on gender and leadership by women.”
That visit took place one hour before a “main meeting” concerning Clinton.
In June 2015, Sandberg wrote an email to Podesta, saying she would “still want HRC to win badly.”
“I am still here to help as I can. She came over and was magical with my kids,” Sandberg wrote.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook, sent a personal email to Podesta in August 2015, saying he enjoyed spending time with him, and that their conversation gave him “a lot to think about.”
Zuckerberg thanked Podesta for sharing his experiences with the Center for American Progress (CAP), a Democratic think tank founded by Podesta.
Included in the thread was an email to Podesta from Elliot Schrage, the vice president of communications at Facebook, who said Zuckerberg was looking for a way to “direct his wealth to have an impact as great as Facebook” adding that Podesta’s ideas had “really moved his thinking.”
Zuckerberg then asked Podesta if he could reach out in the future to hear his ideas and said he was looking forward to continuing their conversation.
“I hope it’s okay if I reach out as my thinking develops to get your ideas and reactions,” Zuckerberg said. “If there are any other folks you think I should talk to, please let me know.”
Some Twitter users were quick to point out the hypocrisy behind Democrats spending so much time and energy investigating all the major social media sites, desperately searching for any possible collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia, even though Facebook colluded with Clinton.
Several users began tweeting under the hashtag #FaceBookLeaks, hoping to bring attention to the story.
September 29, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | Facebook, Hillary Clinton, United States |
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It appears that in its eagerness to accuse Russian hackers of meddling in the US presidential election, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wrongly claimed California’s election systems had been breached.
California Secretary of State Alex Padilla released a statement in which he confirmed that DHS officials had told him that the state’s election system had been “scanned” by Russian hackers.
“Last Friday, my office was notified by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that Russian cyber actors ‘scanned’ California’s Internet-facing systems in 2016, including Secretary of State websites. Following our request for further information, it became clear that DHS’ conclusions were wrong,” he wrote in a statement published on Wednesday.
He went on to stress that last Friday’s notification from the DHS wasn’t just “a year late,” but was also “bad information.”
Now the DHS instead maintains – without any stated evidence – that “Russian scanning activity… occurred on the California Department of Technology statewide network,” rather than Secretary of State websites.
California’s Secretary of State does not use the Department of Technology to provide IT services for its website, internet-facing applications, or the statewide voter registration database, according to Padilla’s office.
Padilla’s statement added that based on this additional information, “the California Secretary of State elections infrastructure and websites were not hacked or breached by Russian cyber actors.”
As for the Department of Technology allegedly being breached, the office said its security systems were able to block “suspect activity.” However, claims that Russians were behind any such attempt remain unsubstantiated.
Padilla’s statement comes after California – along with 20 other states – was told last week that its systems were targeted last year “by Russian government cyber actors seeking vulnerabilities and access to US election infrastructure.”
The DHS’ mistake in California is the second time in a week that the department’s credibility has come into question, as it was forced to backtrack earlier this week on its claim that Russian hackers attempted to hack Wisconsin’s election infrastructure.
Just as in the case of California, the DHS quickly pointed to another government department which the elusive Russians allegedly tried to hack – the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development.
It is an interesting – and once again unproven – claim, considering the office merely oversees job training and unemployment benefits.
Despite ongoing claims and an investigation into Russian meddling in the US presidential election, no evidence has been provided to support the hysteria.
A congressional investigation into Russia’s alleged meddling in the US election has been dragging on 10 months, with any hard evidence explicitly pointing to the role of Russian authorities yet to be produced.
Moscow has repeatedly denied interfering in the election campaign.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has rebuffed the meddling claims, on one occasion noting that the US is not “a banana republic,” for others to interfere with its people’s choice.
In an interview with filmmaker Oliver Stone in June, Putin instead accused the US of meddling in Russia’s most recent presidential elections in 2012, by campaigning on the side of the Russian opposition.
Moreover, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said in August that there is “no doubt” the US will again try to meddle in the 2018 presidential election.
That same month, US President Donald Trump told a rally in West Virginia that the Russia story is a “total fabrication” and an excuse used by Democrats for the “greatest loss in the history of American politics.”
He said that prosecutors should instead be focused on Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails rather than alleged Russian meddling.
Read more:
September 28, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Russophobia | DHS, United States |
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The “Field of Dreams” slogan for America’s NGOs should be: “If you pay for it, we will come.” And right now, tens of millions of dollars are flowing to non-governmental organizations if they will buttress the thesis of Russian “meddling” in the U.S. democratic process no matter how sloppy the “research” or how absurd the “findings.”
And, if you think the pillars of the U.S. mainstream media – The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN and others – will apply some quality controls, you haven’t been paying attention for the past year or so. The MSM is just as unethical as the NGOs are.
So, we are now in a phase of Russia-gate in which NGO “scholars” produce deeply biased reports and their nonsense is treated as front-page news and items for serious discussion across the MSM.
Yet, there’s even an implicit confession about how pathetic some of this “scholarship” is in the hazy phrasing that gets applied to the “findings,” although the weasel words will slip past most unsuspecting Americans and will be dropped for more definitive language when the narrative is summarized in the next day’s newspaper or in a cable-news “crawl.”
For example, a Times front-page story on Thursday reported that “a network of Twitter accounts suspected of links to Russia seized on both sides of the [NFL players kneeling during the National Anthem] issue with hashtags, such as #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee.”
The story, which fits neatly into the current U.S. propaganda meme that the Russian government somehow is undermining American democracy by stirring up dissent inside the U.S., quickly spread to other news outlets and became the latest “proof” of a Russian “war” against America.
However, before we empty the nuclear silos and exterminate life on the planet, we might take a second to look at the Times phrasing: “a network of Twitter accounts suspected of links to Russia.”
The vague wording doesn’t even say the Russian government was involved but rather presents an unsupported claim that some Twitter accounts are “suspected” of being part of some “network” and that this “network” may have some ill-defined connection – or “links” – to “Russia,” a country of 144 million people.
‘Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon’
It’s like the old game of “six degrees of separation” from Kevin Bacon. Yes, perhaps we are all “linked” to Kevin Bacon somehow but that doesn’t prove that we know Kevin Bacon or are part of a Kevin Bacon “network” that is executing a grand conspiracy to sow discontent by taking opposite sides of issues and then tweeting.
Yet that is the underlying absurdity of the Times article by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Scott Shane. Still, as silly as the article may be that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. The Times’ high-profile treatment of these gauzy allegations represents a grave danger to the world by fueling a growing hysteria inside the United States about being “at war” with nuclear-armed Russia. At some point, someone might begin to take this alarmist rhetoric seriously.
Yes, I understand that lots of people hate President Trump and see Russia-gate as the golden ticket to his impeachment. But that doesn’t justify making serious allegations with next to no proof, especially when the outcome could be thermonuclear war.
However, with all those millions of dollars sloshing around the NGO world and Western academia – all looking for some “study” to fund that makes Russia look bad – you are sure to get plenty of takers. And, we should now expect that new “findings” like these will fill in for the so-far evidence-free suspicions about Russia and Trump colluding to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton.
If you read more deeply into the Times story, you get a taste of where Russia-gate is headed next and a clue as to who is behind it:
“Since last month, researchers at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan initiative of the German Marshall Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, have been publicly tracking 600 Twitter accounts — human users and suspected bots alike — they have linked to Russian influence operations. Those were the accounts pushing the opposing messages on the N.F.L. and the national anthem.
“Of 80 news stories promoted last week by those accounts, more than 25 percent ‘had a primary theme of anti-Americanism,’ the researchers found. About 15 percent were critical of Hillary Clinton, falsely accusing her of funding left-wing antifa — short for anti-fascist — protesters, tying her to the lethal terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 and discussing her daughter Chelsea’s use of Twitter. Eleven percent focused on wiretapping in the federal investigation into Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, with most of them treated the news as a vindication for President Trump’s earlier wiretapping claims.”
The Neocons, Again!
So, let’s stop and unpack this Times’ reporting. First, this Alliance for Securing Democracy is not some neutral truth-seeking organization but a neoconservative-dominated outfit that includes on its advisory board such neocon luminaries as Mike Chertoff, Bill Kristol and former Freedom House president David Kramer along with other anti-Russia hardliners such as former deputy CIA director Michael Morell and former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers.
How many of these guys, do you think, were assuring us that Iraq was hiding WMDs back in 2003?
This group clearly has an ax to grind, a record of deception, and plenty of patrons in the Military-Industrial Complex who stand to make billions of dollars from the New Cold War.
The neocons also have been targeting Russia for regime change for years because they see Russian President Vladimir Putin as the chief obstacle to their goal of helping Israel achieve its desire for “regime change” in Syria and a chance to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran. Russia-gate has served the neocons well as a very convenient way to pull Democrats, liberals and even progressives into the neocon agenda because Russia-gate is sold as a powerful weapon for the anti-Trump Resistance.
The Times article also might have mentioned that Twitter has 974 million accounts. So, this alarm over 600 accounts is a bit disproportionate for a front-page story in the Times, don’t you think?
And, there’s the definitional problem of what constitutes “anti-Americanism” in a news article. And what does it mean to be “linked to Russian influence operations”? Does that include Americans who may not march in lockstep to the one-sided State Department narratives on the crises in Ukraine and Syria? Any deviation from Official Washington’s groupthink makes you a “Moscow stooge.”
And, is it a crime to be “critical” of Hillary Clinton or to note that the U.S. mainstream media was dismissive of Trump’s claims about being wiretapped only for us to find out later that the FBI apparently was wiretapping his campaign manager?
However, such questions aren’t going to be asked amid what has become a massive Russia-gate groupthink, dominating not just Official Washington, but across much of America’s political landscape and throughout the European Union.
Why the Bias?
Beyond the obvious political motivations for this bias, we also have had the introduction of vast sums of money pouring in from the U.S. government, NATO and European institutions to support the business of “combatting Russian propaganda.”
For example, last December, President Obama signed into law a $160 million funding mechanism entitled the “Combating Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act.” But that amounts to only a drop in the bucket considering already existing Western propaganda projects targeting Russia.
So, a scramble is on to develop seemingly academic models to “prove” what Western authorities want proven: that Russia is at fault for pretty much every bad thing that happens in the world, particularly the alienation of many working-class people from the Washington-Brussels elites.
The truth cannot be that establishment policies have led to massive income inequality and left the working class struggling to survive and thus are to blame for ugly political manifestations – from Trump to Brexit to the surprising support for Germany’s far-right AfD party. No, it must be Russia! Russia! Russia! And there’s a lot of money on the bed to prove that point.
There’s also the fact that the major Western news media is deeply invested in bashing Russia as well as in the related contempt for Trump and his followers. Those twin prejudices have annihilated all professional standards that would normally be applied to news judgments regarding these flawed “studies.”
On Thursday, The Washington Post ran its own banner-headlined story drawn from the same loose accusations made by that neocon-led Alliance for Securing Democracy, but instead the Post sourced the claims to Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma. The headline read: “Russian trolls are stoking NFL controversy, senator says.”
The “evidence” cited by Lankford’s office was one “Twitter account calling itself Boston Antifa that gives its geolocation as Vladivostok, Russia,” the Post reported.
By Thursday, Twitter had suspended the Boston Antifa account, so I couldn’t send it a question, but earlier this month, Dan Glaun, a reporter for Masslive.com, reported that the people behind Boston Antifa were “a pair of anti-leftist pranksters from Oregon who started Boston Antifa as a parody of actual anti-fascist groups.”
In an email to me on Thursday, Glaun cited an interview that the Boston Antifa pranksters had done with right-wing radio talk show host Gavin McInnes last April.
And, by the way, there are apps that let you manipulate your geolocation data on Twitter. Or, you can choose to believe that the highly professional Russian intelligence agencies didn’t notice that they were telegraphing their location as Vladivostok.
Mindless Russia Bashing
Another example of this mindless Russia bashing appeared just below the Post’s story on Lankford’s remarks. The Post sidebar cited a “study” from researchers at Oxford University’s Project on Computational Propaganda asserting that “junk news” on Twitter “flowed more heavily in a dozen [U.S.] battleground states than in the nation overall in the days immediately before and after the 2016 presidential election, suggesting that a coordinated effort targeted the most pivotal voters.” Cue the spooky Boris and Natasha music!
Of course, any Americans living in “battleground states” could tell you that they are inundated with all kinds of election-related “junk,” including negative TV advertising, nasty radio messages, alarmist emails and annoying robo-calls at dinner time. That’s why they’re called “battleground states,” Sherlock.
But what’s particularly offensive about this “study” is that it implies that the powers-that-be must do more to eliminate what these “experts” deem “propaganda” and “junk news.” If you read deeper into the story, you discover that the researchers applied a very subjective definition of what constitutes “junk news,” i.e., information that the researchers don’t like even if it is truthful and newsworthy.
The Post article by Craig Timberg, who apparently is using Russia-gate to work himself off the business pages and onto the national staff, states that “The researchers defined junk news as ‘propaganda and ideologically extreme, hyperpartisan, or conspiratorial political news and information.’
“The researchers also categorized reports from Russia and ones from WikiLeaks – which published embarrassing posts about Democrat Hillary Clinton based on a hack of her campaign chairman’s emails – as ‘polarizing political content’ for the purpose of the analysis.”
So, this “study” lumped together “junk news” with accurate and newsworthy information, i.e., WikiLeaks’ disclosure of genuine emails that contained such valid news as the contents of Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street banks (which she was trying to hide from voters) as well as evidence of the unethical tactics used by the Democratic National Committee to sabotage Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign.
Also dumped into the researchers’ bin of vile “disinformation” were “reports from Russia,” as if everything that comes out of Russia is, ipso facto, “junk news.”
And, what, pray tell, is “conspiratorial political news”? I would argue that the past year of evidence-lite allegations about “Russian meddling” in the U.S. election accompanied by unsupported suspicions about “collusion” with the Trump campaign would constitute “conspiratorial political news.” Indeed, I would say that this Oxford “research” constitutes “conspiratorial political news” and that Timberg’s article qualifies as “junk news.”
Predictable Outcome
Given the built-in ideological bias of this “research,” it probably won’t surprise you that the report’s author, Philip N. Howard, concludes that “junk news originates from three main sources that the Oxford group has been tracking: Russian operatives, Trump supporters and activists part of the alt-right,” according to the Post.
I suppose that since part of the “methodology” was to define “reports from Russia” as “junk news,” the appearance of “Russian operatives” shouldn’t be much of a surprise, but the whole process reeks of political bias.
Further skewing the results, the report separated out information from “professional news organizations [and] political parties” from “some ‘junk news’ source,” according to the Post. In other words, the “researchers” believe that “professional news organizations” are inherently reliable and that outside-the-mainstream news is “junk” – despite the MSM’s long record of getting major stories wrong.
The real “junk” is this sort of academic or NGO research that starts with a conclusion and packs a “study” in such a way as to guarantee the preordained conclusion. Or as the old saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out.”
Yet, it’s also clear that if you generate “research” that feeds the hungry beast of Russia-gate, you will find eager patrons doling out dollars and a very receptive audience in the mainstream media.
In a place like Washington, there are scores if not hundreds of reports generated every day and only a tiny fraction get the attention of the Times, Post, CNN, etc., let alone result in published articles. But “studies” that reinforce today’s anti-Russia narrative are sure winners.
So, if you’re setting up a new NGO or you’re an obscure academic angling for a lucrative government grant as well as some flattering coverage in the MSM, the smart play is to join the new gold rush in decrying “Russian propaganda.”
[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Rise of the New McCarthyism”; “WPost Pushes More Dubious Russia-Bashing”; “The Crazy Imbalance of Russia-gate”; and “More Holes in Russia-gate Narrative.”]
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
September 28, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Alliance for Securing Democracy, CIA, United States |
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Donald Trump’s performance last week at the UN General Assembly set the rhetorical bar for U.S. imperial piggery at a 21st century low — although Hillary “We came, we saw, he died” Clinton is surely his equal in moral depravity. At about the same time that Trump was threatening to incinerate a whole nation of people, Bernie Sanders attempted to fill in the vast holes in his own foreign policy profile, in a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, the same venue where Winston Churchill, the 20th century’s prototypical western imperial pig politician, delivered his Cold War-initiating “Iron Curtain descending on Europe” speech in 1946. This is deep swine territory, and Sanders could not help but wallow in it.
Churchill was an arch racist, an admirer of fascists until they threatened his home island and its global colonial empire, and a great innovator in war crimes against civilian populations — and, therefore, a hero of the Wild White West. Sanders revealed his own swinish predilections in Westminster. The Vermont senator reverently quoted Churchill’s “strategic concept” to provide “nothing less than the safety and welfare, the freedom and progress, of all the homes and families of all the men and women in all the lands.” What these words actually meant in the mouth of an imperialist, is eternal subjugation of the darker races while rich white men bore the “burden” of global governance. But Sanders chose to give the most benign interpretation to Churchill’s colonial pig-talk, claiming the British prime minister’s “challenge” to current society means moving “toward a global community in which people have the decent jobs, food, clean water, education, health care and housing they need.”
Churchill would never dream of providing a welfare state for Britain’s colonial captives, nor is Sanders proposing to do so for the far-flung subjects of the U.S. empire. However, imperialists reserve for themselves and their “exceptional” home countries the right — no, the obligation (or “burden”) — to shape the destinies of the rest of the human species, if only in their imaginations or to garner cheap speechmaking points. President George W. Bush also wanted to bring “freedom and progress” and safety and welfare and all those other good things to Iraq in the wake of Shock and Awe — and doubtless meant it. Donald Trump has a vision of prosperity for the world, too – embossed with his own golden logo. The Japanese empire imposed an Asian “Co-Prosperity Sphere,” under the armed guidance of Tokyo.
Bernie Sanders is an imperialist, and therefore of the same general political species as Churchill, Clinton and Trump. Many of Sanders’ leftish supporters cannot fathom how anyone could describe their hero as “an imperialist pig,” as I did in a June 15 article. They think imperialism is a personal characteristic, a kind of meanness — the same misconception they have about racism — rather than a global system centered in their home country. That’s why, not only is nearly every self-styled “patriot” an imperialist, but so are many, if not most, U.S. “progressives” — especially the white ones. They truly cannot fathom the meaning of other people’s right to self-determination, but see themselves as benevolent vectors of human progress – which is why “liberals” are so prone to crimes of “humanitarian” military intervention, the imperialist hoax-of-choice since Bill Clinton’s presidency.
A disturbing proportion of Black Americans have caught the same disease, after eight years of identification with U.S. power under Obama, whom, I wrote “was among the most aggressive defenders of white supremacy in history,” having waged seven simultaneous wars to preserve the U.S.-based multinational corporate empire. Obama handed off those wars to Trump, who is vigorously pursuing all of them and threatening more aggressions.
Foreign policy was largely an afterthought in Bernie Sanders presidential campaign — which is a kind way of saying that he did not challenge Barack Obama’s foreign policy and was, therefore, in tacit agreement with the First Black President’s global depredations. Certainly, Sanders backed sanctions against Russia (“that means tightening the screws on them”) and supported the near-genocidal Obama-Clinton regime change war “to get rid of this guy [President al Assad]” in Syria. That’s more than enough to qualify the 2016 Sanders as a world class imperialist pig.
The 2017 version is much the same. Like virtually the entire Democratic Party, Sanders eagerly foments anti-Russian hysteria, embracing CIA tales of Russian “efforts to undermine one of our greatest strengths: the integrity of our elections, and our faith in our own democracy.” He vows to “work in solidarity with supporters of democracy around the globe, including in Russia” – code words for continuation of the Obama-Hillary Clinton policy to foster regime change in Moscow. No serious advocate for peace talks like that — and if you do not advocate for peace, you are not a progressive.
Sanders’ anti-Russia rhetoric negates much of the progressive-sounding wordage in Sanders speech. At any rate, his remarks contained very little of substance on the burning issues of the day. Sanders delivered mostly pablum to signify that he is the Not-Trump, and takes strong stands only on long dead issues. “The goal is not for the United States to dominate the world,” he said. “Nor, on the other hand, is our goal to withdraw from the international community and shirk our responsibilities under the banner of ‘America First.’” But even Trump is capable of saying nice things about the UN — and did, last week, even as he displayed complete contempt for and ignorance of international law. And Barack Obama broke every international law and covenant in the book, while grandiloquently playing the globalist.
Sanders said the U.S. should not have overthrown the elected Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, in 1953, and shouldn’t have deposed Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973. He was against the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War — George Bush’s, not the current Obama-Trump Iraq war, about which he has nothing to say.
Sanders claims to oppose the U.S.-backed Saudi Arabian war against Yemen, although last year he was encouraging the Saudis to become more aggressive in the region. (He apparently meant more aggression against Syria — a violation of international law with which Sanders had no quarrel, since President Assad is a “bad guy” and the Russians are trying to subvert “our democracy.”)
“The Global War on Terror has been a disaster for the American people and for American leadership,” said Sanders. “We must rethink the old Washington mindset that judges ‘seriousness’ according to the willingness to use force. One of the key misapprehensions of this mindset is the idea that military force is decisive in a way that diplomacy is not.”
The “new Washington mindset” Sanders fuzzily proposes has no room for the universal principles of self-determination, national sovereignty and international law. It should be understood that Sanders is talking about use of American military force against sovereign nations; “diplomacy” does not apply to al-Qaida and its ISIS offshoot. Sanders fails to once mention the legality of U.S. violations of other nations’ sovereignty — because he is an imperialist who does not respect international law. Sanders says “military force is sometimes necessary, but always — always — as the last resort,” but he does not recognize that only the UN Security Council can legally authorize attacks on sovereign nations. Plus, even Trump will claim that he only unleashes the military as a last resort.
Bernie Sanders supports the Iran nuclear deal. So do lots of Republicans. But, the “deal” is an imperialist instrument, based on lies that even the U.S. intelligence agencies rejected. In 2007, all of the U.S. spy agencies joined in assessing that Iran had dismantled its nuclear program in 2003. This National Intelligence Estimate outraged the Bush regime, and probably prevented them from launching a full-scale military attack on Iran. But the Obama administration ignored the Estimate, despite another intelligence assessment in 2011 that determined Iran was still on a non-weapons nuclear track. The U.S. and Israel nevertheless waged an assassination campaign against Iranian scientists and unleashed the world’s first massive cyber-attack on the country’s installations, finally threatening a full-scale military attack to force through the current “deal” on nuclear weapons.
Donald Trump, the unilateralist imperialist, threatens to break the deal. Sanders says the U.S. should honor it. But the Iran agreement is itself an imperial imposition based on threats of armed aggression. Whoever supports that type of “diplomacy” is as much an imperialist pig as Trump.
Sanders wants the Iran agreement to serve as a model for dealing with North Korea; in other words, bully Pyongyang until it buckles under. The difference between Sanders approach and Trump’s “fire and fury” is that the Democrat would “look for ways to tighten international sanctions” through “the international community working together.” But, it’s the same lawless blackmail. Sanders says nothing about direct talks with North Korea, the North’s key demand, which would amount to actual diplomacy. But that would smack of equality among nations – an anathema to imperial powers, and to would-be imperial presidents, Bernie Sanders included.
In his entire speech on foreign affairs, Sanders did not utter the word “Africa” once, nor did he say the word “Israel.” Yet the U.S. virtually occupies the continent of Africa, through its African Command, while Israel practically occupies U.S. foreign policy. Does that mean Sanders has no policy on Africa or Israel? No, it means he goes along with the general direction of U.S. imperial policy as it exists – because he is an imperialist.
Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com .
September 28, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | Bernie Sanders, CIA, Democratic Party, United States, Zionism |
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Recently, the Islamic State’s purported “terror franchises” in Afghanistan and Pakistan have claimed a spate of bombings against the Shi’a and Barelvi Muslims who are regarded as heretics by Takfiris. But to contend that the Islamic State is responsible for suicide blasts in Pakistan and Afghanistan is to declare that the Taliban are responsible for the sectarian war in Syria and Iraq.
Both are localized militant outfits and the Islamic State without its Baathist command structure and superior weaponry is just another ragtag, regional militant outfit. The distinction between the Taliban and the Islamic State lies in the fact that the Taliban follow Deobandi sect of Sunni Islam which is a sect native to South Asia and the jihadists of the Islamic State mostly belong to Wahhabi denomination.
Secondly, and more importantly, the insurgency in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan is a Pashtun uprising which is an ethnic group native to Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan, while the bulk of the Islamic State’s jihadists is comprised of Arab militants of Syria and Iraq.
The so-called “Khorasan Province” of the Islamic State in the Af-Pak region is nothing more than an alliance of several breakaway factions of the Taliban and a few other inconsequential local militant outfits that have adopted the name “Islamic State” to enhance their prestige, but that don’t have any organizational and operations association, whatsoever, with the Islamic State proper in Syria and Iraq.
Conflating the Islamic State either with Al-Qaeda, with the Taliban or with myriads of ragtag, local militant groups is a deliberate deception intended to mislead public opinion in order to exaggerate the threat posed by the Islamic State which serves the scaremongering agenda of security establishments.
Regardless, the only difference between the Afghan jihad back in the ‘80s that spawned Islamic jihadists such as the Taliban and Al-Qaeda for the first time in history and the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, 2011-onward, is that the Afghan jihad was an overt jihad: back then, the Western political establishments and their mouthpiece, the mainstream media, used to openly brag that the CIA provides all those AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and stingers to Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, which then distributes those deadly weapons amongst the Afghan so-called “freedom fighters” to combat the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
After the 9/11 tragedy, however, the Western political establishments and corporate media have become a lot more circumspect, therefore this time around they have waged covert jihads against the Arab-nationalist Gaddafi regime in Libya and the anti-Zionist Assad regime in Syria, in which Islamic jihadists (aka terrorists) have been sold as “moderate rebels” with secular and nationalist ambitions to the Western audience.
Since the regime change objective in those hapless countries went against the mainstream narrative of ostensibly fighting a war against terrorism, therefore the Western political establishments and the mainstream media are now trying to muddle the reality by offering color-coded schemes to identify myriads of militant and terrorist outfits operating in Syria: such as the red militants of the Islamic State and Al-Nusra Front which the Western powers want to eliminate; the yellow Islamic jihadists, like Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, with whom the Western powers can collaborate under desperate circumstances; and the green militants of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and a few other inconsequential outfits which together comprise the so-called “moderate” Syrian opposition.
If we were to draw parallels between the Soviet-Afghan jihad during the ‘80s and the Syrian civil war of today, the Western powers used the training camps located in the Af-Pak border regions to train and arm Afghan “Mujahideen” against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
Similarly, the training camps located in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan are being used to provide training and weapons to Sunni Arab militants to battle the Shi’a-dominated Syrian regime with the collaboration of Turkish, Jordanian and Saudi intelligence agencies.
During the Afghan jihad, it is a known historical fact that the bulk of the so-called “freedom fighters” was comprised of Pashtun Islamic jihadists, such as the factions of Jalaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf and scores of other militant outfits, some of which later coalesced together to form the Taliban movement.
Similarly, in Syria, the majority of the so-called “moderate rebels” is comprised of Sunni Arab jihadists, such as Jaysh al-Islam, Ahrar al-Sham, al-Nusra Front, the Islamic State and myriads of other militant groups, including a small portion of defected Syrian soldiers who go by the name of Free Syria Army (FSA).
Moreover, apart from Pashtun Islamic jihadists, various factions of the Northern Alliance of Tajiks and Uzbeks constituted the relatively “moderate” segment of the Afghan rebellion, though those “moderate” warlords, like Ahmad Shah Massoud and Abul Rashid Dostum, were more ethnic and tribal in character than secular or nationalist, as such.
Similarly, the Kurds of the so-called “Syrian Democratic Forces” can be compared to the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan. The socialist PYD/YPG Kurds of Syria, however, were allied with the Baathist regime against the Sunni Arab jihadists for the first three years of the Syrian civil war, i.e. from August 2011 to August 2014.
At the behest of American stooge in Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, the Syrian Kurds have switched sides in the last three years after the United States policy reversal and declaration of war against one faction of the Syrian opposition, the Islamic State, when the latter overstepped its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in June 2014, from where the US troops had withdrawn only a couple of years previously in December 2011.
Regarding the creation and composition of the Islamic State, apart from training and arms which have been provided to Syrian militants in the training camps located in the Turkish and Jordanian border regions adjacent to Syria by the CIA in collaboration with Turkish, Jordanian and Saudi intelligence agencies, another factor that has contributed to the stellar success of the Islamic State is that its top cadres are comprised of former Baathist military and intelligence officers from the Saddam era.
According to reports, hundreds of ex-Baathists constitute the top and mid-tier command structure of the Islamic State who plan all the operations and direct its military strategy. The only feature that differentiates Islamic State from all other insurgent groups is its command structure which is comprised of professional ex-Baathists and its state-of-the-art weaponry that has been provided to all the Sunni Arab militant outfits fighting in Syria by the intelligence agencies of the Western powers, Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf states.
Moreover, it is an indisputable fact that morale and ideology plays an important role in battle, and well-informed readers must also be aware that the Takfiri brand of most jihadists these days has been directly inspired by the puritanical Wahhabi-Salafi ideology of Saudi Arabia, but ideology alone is not sufficient to succeed in battle.
Looking at the Islamic State’s astounding gains in Syria and Iraq in 2014, a question arises, where do its recruits get all the training and state-of-the-art weapons that are imperative not only for hit-and-run guerrilla warfare but also for capturing and holding large swathes of territory?
According to a revelatory December 2013 news report [1] from The National newspaper affiliated with the UAE government which supports the Syrian opposition: it is clearly mentioned that along with AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and other military gear, the Saudi regime also provides machine gun-mounted Toyota pick-up trucks to every batch of five jihadists who have completed their training in the training camps located at the border regions of Jordan.
Once those militants cross over to Daraa and Quneitra in southern Syria from the Jordan-Syria border, then those Toyota pick-up trucks can easily travel all the way to Raqqa and Deir al-Zor and thence to Mosul and Anbar in Iraq.
Moreover, it is clearly spelled out in the report that Syrian militants get arms and training through a secret command center based in the intelligence headquarters’ building in Amman, Jordan, that has been staffed by high-ranking military officials from 14 countries, including the US, European nations, Israel and the Gulf Arab States to wage a covert war against the government in Syria.
Finally, unlike al Qaeda, which is a transnational terrorist organization that generally employs anti-colonial and anti-West rhetoric to draw funds and followers, the Islamic State and the majority of Sunni Arab militant groups fighting in Syria are basically anti-Shi’a sectarian outfits. By the designation “terrorism” it is generally implied and understood that an organization which has the intentions and capability of carrying out acts of terrorism on the Western soil.
Although the Islamic State has carried out a few acts of terrorism against the Western countries, such as the high profile Paris, Brussels and Manchester attacks, but if we look at the pattern of its subversive activities, especially in the Middle East, it generally targets the Shi’a Muslims in Syria and Iraq. A few acts of terrorism that it has carried out in the Gulf Arab states were also directed against the Shi’a Muslims in the Eastern province of Saudi Arabia and Shi’a mosques in Yemen and Kuwait.
Sources and links:
[1] Syrian rebels get arms and advice through secret command center in Amman:
http://www.thenational.ae/world/middle-east/syrian-rebels-get-arms-and-advice-through-secret-command-centre-in-amman
September 28, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Deception | Afghanistan, CIA, Iraq, Middle East, Syria, United States |
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The Washington Post has been forced to remove Russia from the headline and alter the content of its front-page “scoop” over a supposed conversation between Barack Obama and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, after the social network denied the newspaper’s claims.
Under the headline “Obama sought to prod Facebook on Russia role,” the three-author story alleged that “Obama and his top aides quietly agonized over how to respond to Russia’s brazen intervention on behalf of the Donald Trump” prior to the 2016 election, before the last US president “pulled the youthful tech billionaire aside and delivered what he hoped would be a wake-up call” last November.
Only this is not what the exchange at the APEC conference in Peru on November 19, 2016 was about – and there was no mention of political interference from Moscow or anyone else.
“Their conversation was about misinformation and false news, which Mark had addressed the previous day in a post that outlined specific steps Facebook was taking to combat these challenges. The discussion did not include any references to possible foreign interference or suggestions about confronting threats to Facebook,” the social network in a statement.
Obama’s representatives have declined to comment on the Washington Post story.
The Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has changed the story title in its online archive, and says its piece has now been “updated with an additional response from Facebook.”
The authors used the misrepresented Obama conversation as a hook into a 2,500-word report about the social network’s slowness in catching on to, and counteracting purported Russian meddling, and to put forward expert claims that it “dragged its feet and is acting only now because of outside political pressure.”
“We believe in the power of democracy, which is why we’re taking this work on elections integrity so seriously, and have come forward at every opportunity to share what we’ve found,” Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president for public policy and communications, told the Washington Post in response.
Read more:
September 27, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | Washington Post |
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On this electoral poster, the map of « independent Kurdistan » overflows from the autonomous Iraqi region onto Iraqi and Syrian territory.
The referendum for the independence of Kurdistan is a fool’s game. The United States, which secretly supports it, claims in public to oppose it. France and the United Kingdom are doing the same, hoping that Washington will make their old dreams come true. Not to be outdone, Russia is hinting that although it is against any unilateral change, it might support independence… as long as everyone accepts the independence of Crimea, which means accepting its attachment to Moscow.
The degree of hypocrisy of the permanent members of the UN Security Council is such that they have so far been unable to give a ruling on this question, despite their apparent unanimity. They have not adopted any resolution (in other words, a text with international force of law), nor Presidential declaration (in other words a position common to the members of the Council) – nothing except an insipid Press release during their meeting on 19 September [1].
Currently, there exist eight non-recognised States – Abkhazia, North Cyprus, Nagorno-Karabagh, Kosovo, Ossetia, Western Sahara, Somaliland and Trasnistria. Two European regions are also hoping for independence – Catalonia and Scotland. Any modification of the status of Iraqi Kurdistan will have consequences for these ten countries.
The independence of Iraqi Kurdistan would be a tour de force, insofar as it would mean displacing Kurdistan, as it was recognised by the Sèvres Conference in 1920, from its current location on Turkish territory to Iraqi territory. Of course, everyone has become used to using the title Kurdistan to indicate this region, which, since 1991, has been subject to a slow and continual ethnic cleansing by London and Washington.
During « Desert Storm », this region was mainly inhabited by Iraqi Kurds. London and Washington made it a no-fly zone against President Hussein. They forced into power one of their collaborators from the Cold War, Massoud Barzani, who initiated the displacement of the non-Kurdish populations. The same Barzani, although he was twice re-elected since then, has maintained his grip on power for more than two years without a mandate. The National Assembly, which demanded his departure, has met only once since the end of his mandate to vote the principle of the referendum, but in the absence of Goran – a party which has continually denounced the feudal system of the Barzanis and the Talabanis, and the nepotism and the corruption which are the direct result. In fact, Massoud Barzani has been in power, without interruption, for the last 26 years.
From 1991 to 2003, the non-Kurds progressively left the no-fly zone, so that the region was proclaimed, with the defeat of President Hussein, as Iraqi Kurdistan.
On 1 June 2014, the secret services of Saudia Arabia, the United States, Israël, Jordan, the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan, Qatar, the United Kingdom and Turkey organised, in Amman, (Jordan) a preparatory meeting for the invasion of Iraq by Daesh. We know of the existence of this meeting by the Turkish document that Özgür Gündem published immediately [2]. This daily newspaper – with whom I collaborated – has since been shut down by the « sultan » Recep Tayyip Erdoğan [3].
According to this document, it was agreed to coordinate Daesh and the region of Iraqi Kurdistan. The former launched a lightning offensive to capture Mosul, while the latter grabbed Kirkuk. Four days earlier, President Massoud Barzani had travelled to Jordan to talk to the participants of this meeting. He was careful not to take part in the meeting himself, but was represented by his son Masrour, the head of his own Intelligence services.
When Daesh invaded the part of Iraq that the United States had previously attributed to him, they profited from the occasion to imprison the Yezedis and bind them into slavery. Most of the Yezedis are Kurdish, but in conformity with the Amman agreement, the neighbouring Barzanis did not intervene, even when some of them fled into the Sinjar mountains. Those who fled were finally saved by the commandos of the Turkish PKK. The Turkish Kurds saved them all, whether they were Kurds or not. They used this victory to demand their recognition from the Western powers (who, since the Cold War, has viewed them as terrorists). The current revision of this affair by the Barzanis cannot erase their crime against their own people [4].
Another famous Kurd took part in the meeting in Amman – the Islamist Mullah Krekar. He was imprisoned in Norway, where he was serving a five-year sentence for having threatened, on TV, to kill Prime Minister Erna Solberg. He travelled to the Amman meeting in a NATO plane, and was taken back to his cell in the days that followed. He then revealed his allegiance to Daesh. He was not condemned for belonging to a terrorist organisation, but was offered a two-year remission of sentence and was freed. He then went on to direct Daesh in Europe, from Oslo, under the protection of NATO. Clearly, the Stay-behind network of the Atlantic Alliance is still operational [5]
Having annexed Kirkuk, the regional government of Iraqi Kurdistan extended to their zone the ethnic cleansing that its members had been perpetrating in the no-fly zone between 1991 and 2003.
We can relax – the immovable Barzani has assured that he will not implement measures of retaliation against those who vote “No”.
The non-constitutional President Barzani has announced that all the populations of Iraqi Kurdistan and the annexed territories may participate in the referendum. Together, all these regions housed more than twelve million citizens in 2013. But today, three million non-Kurdish citizens have been forced to flee. So only a chosen number of electors are called to vote on the future not only of the place of the expelled legitimate inhabitants, but also that of all other Iraqis.
- In order to participate in the referendum, one must –
- live in Kurdistan or the annexed regions ;
- be over 18 years old ;
- have been registered before 7 September on the electoral lists ;
- and for those who are refugees abroad, one must have been registered for the electronic vote … which supposes that they must first present their papers to the electoral authority of Kurdistan, from which they have been expelled.
As it happens, the Barzanis have a particular conception of the populations who are called to vote. In 1992, there were no more than 971,953 voters, but a decade later, in 2014, they suddenly numbered 2,129,846, and now 3,305,925, on September 25, 2017.
Independence will give the Barzani and Talabani clans further means with which to pursue their affairs. It will also offer Israël the possibility of implementing certain of its military objectives. Since the end of the 1990’s and the development of missile weaponry, Tsahal has abandoned its strategy of occupying the « border regions », meaning the territories just outside its frontiers (Sinaï, Golan, South Lebanon). On the contrary, it intends to neutralise Egypt, Syria and Lebanon by taking them from behind. This is why Tel-Aviv supported the creation of South Sudan, in 2011, in order to place missiles pointed at Egypt, and is today supporting the creation of Kurdistan in order to place missiles pointed at Syria.
According to Israel-Kurd, which is widely quoted by the Turkish Press, Israëli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised Massoud Barzani to transfer 200,000 Israëlis to the new state to « help » with its administration [6].
According to this logic, the ideal for Tsahal would be to extend the territory of Iraqi Kurdistan not only to Kirkuk, but to Northern Syria. This is the purpose of the YPG and its « Rojava ». This self-proclaimed autonomous state is a long corridor which links Iraqi Kurdistan to the Mediterranean, and is occupied by US troops who are illegally installed in several military bases.
Eight months before the Amman meeting, a Pentagon researcher, Robin Wright, confirmed her country’s agreement with this project [7]. At that time, the Barzanis were still claiming that they defended all Kurds, including those who were living in Turkey and Iran. Mrs. Wright carefully explained that such a project was impossible, but published her map of « Sunnistan », attributed to Daesh, and « Kurdistan » attributed to the Barzanis in Iraq and Syria.
Incidentally, in August, the Pentagon published a call for tender for the buying and transfer of 500 million weapons and ammunition, mainly ex-Soviet [8]. The 200 first trucks were delivered to the YPG at Hasakah, on 11 and 19 September, via Iraqi Kurdistan, without being attacked by the jihadistes [9]. The Russian Minister for Defence has just made public satellite photos of a camp of US special forces in the middle of Daesh territory, living quite comfortably with the Kurds and the jihadists [10].
So since we are told that this « independent Kurdistan » is a democratic Kurdish project, why would we doubt it?
Translation by Pete Kimberley
Notes
[1] “UN Security Council Press Statement on Iraqi Kurdistan”, Voltaire Network, 21 September 2017.
[2] « Yer : Amman, Tarih : 1, Konu : Musul », Akif Serhat, Özgür Gündem, 6 juillet 2014.
[3] Those journalists who escaped the purge and managed to flee, created the electronic daily Özgürlükçü Demokrasi outside of Turkey.
[4] “Rewriting the massacre at Sinjar”, Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Voltaire Network, 12 September 2017.
[5] NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe, Daniele Ganser, Routledge, 2004.
[6] “200,000 Israelis expected in “Kurdistan” once independence is declared”, Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Voltaire Network, 20 September 2017.
[7] “Imagining a Remapped Middle East”, Robin Wright, The New York Times Sunday Review, September 28, 2013.
[8] “Heikle Fracht aus Ramstein”, “Millionen Schuss Munition für Kalaschnikows”, Frederik Obermaier & Paul-Anton Krüger, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 12. & 20. September 2017.
[9] “200 lorries of arms and ammunition: delivery by the Pentagon to the YPG”, Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Voltaire Network, 23 September 2017.
[10] « Le ministère russe de la Défense diffuse des photos des Forces US stationnées chez Daesh », Réseau Voltaire, 24 septembre 2017.
September 27, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Israel, Middle East, United States, YPG |
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The preliminary investigation into the death of Russian Lieutenant-General Asapov near Syrian Deir ez-Zor has shown data leaks to Daesh, a source in the Syrian security forces told Sputnik.
“The results of a preliminary investigation into the death of general Asapov in Deir ez-Zor evidences a leak of information on his location to the side that carried out the attack,” the source said.
Lieutenant-General Valery Asapov died on Sunday after sustaining a “fatal injury” in a Daesh shelling near Deir ez-Zor, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.
Asapov was a member of the group of Russian military advisers providing Syrian commanders with assistance during the operation aimed at the liberation of the city of Deir ez-Zor.
Commenting on the incident, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov on Monday that the death of Asapov is the price that Russia paid for the “duplicity” of the United States in actions aimed at resolving the crisis in the region.
Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry circulated an aerial footage of the areas where Daesh militants were stationed near Deir ez-Zor, clearly showing US special forces’ military vehicles at strongholds previously fortified by terrorists.
September 26, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Deception, War Crimes | Russia, Syria, United States |
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That was quick.
Less than a week after Facebook agreed to turn over to Congressional investigators copies of the 3,000-odd political advertisements that the company said it had inadvertently sold to a Russia-linked group intent on meddling in the 2016 presidential election, the contents of the ads have – unsurprisingly – leaked, just as we had expected them to.
Congressional investigators shared the information with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, which has repeatedly allowed information about its investigation into whether members of the Trump campaign actively colluded with Russian operatives to leak to the press. Once this happened, we knew it was only a matter of time before the ads became part of the public record.
And, shockingly, descriptions of the ads provided to the Washington Post hardly fit the narrative that Democratic lawmakers have spun in recent weeks, claiming the ads – which didn’t advocate on behalf of a specific candidate, but rather hewed to political issues like abortion rights – were instrumental in securing Trump’s victory.
After initially denying the story this spring, Facebook came clean earlier this month, saying its investigators had discovered that the company sold at least $100,000 worth of ads – and possibly as much as $150,000 – to a Russia-linked group that bought the ads through 470 phony Facebook pages and accounts.
WaPo reports that the ads represented issues on both sides of the ideological spectrum, which would suggest that the buyers didn’t intend to support a specific candidate, but rather their own unique agenda.
The batch of more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads that Facebook is preparing to turn over to Congress shows a deep understanding of social divides in American society, with some ads promoting African-American rights groups including Black Lives Matter and others suggesting that these same groups pose a rising political threat, say people familiar with the covert influence campaign.
The Russian campaign — taking advantage of Facebook’s ability to simultaneously send contrary messages to different groups of users based on their political and demographic characteristics – also sought to sow discord among religious groups. Other ads highlighted support for Democrat Hillary Clinton among Muslim women.
Of course, support for Hillary Clinton among minority groups was less enthusiastic than it was for Barack Obama, suggesting that the ads perhaps weren’t as effective as some Democratic lawmakers would have voters believe. Despite the innocuous description, WaPo insisted on reporting that the ads were meant to “sow discord” among different voting blocs that supported Clinton. The paper of record also reported that the targeted messages “highlight the sophistication of an influence campaign slickly crafted to mimic and infiltrate US political discourse”… again without explaining exactly how they accomplished this.
These targeted messages, along with others that have surfaced in recent days, highlight the sophistication of an influence campaign slickly crafted to mimic and infiltrate U.S. political discourse while also seeking to heighten tensions between groups already wary of one another.
Yet, WaPo reports that the “nature and detail” of the ads has bothered investigators at Facebook and the Justice Department, as well as those working on behalf of the Congressional committees that are conducting independent investigations. The House and Senate Intelligence committees plan to begin reviewing the Facebook ads in the coming weeks.
Furthermore, the paper ran quotes from Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Adam Schiff, two of the most vocal proponents of the Russia election-hacking conspiracy theory (it is only a theory, after all), describing the ads as part of a sinister effort to undermine the democratic process.
“Their aim was to sow chaos,” said Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “In many cases, it was more about voter suppression rather than increasing turnout.”
The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, said he hoped the public would be able to review the ad campaign.
“I think the American people should see a representative sample of these ads to see how cynical the Russian were using these ads to sow division within our society,” he said, noting that he had not yet seen the ads but had been briefed on them, including the ones mentioning “things like Black Lives Matter.”
For a story that’s supposed to be about the content of political advertisements that are now at the center of a widely followed investigation (much like Don Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer and her entourage in Trump Tower was just a month ago), the WaPo story includes scant details about their contents. For whatever reason, the paper neglected to publish photos of the ads.
We imagine that whoever leaked the story probably figured that once readers see the ads and realize they’re indistinguishable from the rest of the political ad copy running on Facebook, voters will quickly lose interest.
However, that didn’t stop one expert from offering some helpful “context” meant to feed the hysteria without saying anything conclusive. As the paper notes, the expert quoted hasn’t even seen the ads.
While Facebook has downplayed the impact of the Russian ads on the election, Dennis Yu, chief technology officer for BlitzMetrics, a digital marketing company that focuses on Facebook ads, said that $100,000 worth of Facebook ads could have been viewed hundreds of millions of times.
“$100,000 worth of very concentrated posts is very, very powerful,” he said. “When you have a really hot post, you often get this viral multiplier. So when you buy this one ad impression, you can get an extra 20- to 40-times multiplier because those people comment and share it.”
Watts, the Foreign Policy Research Institute fellow, has not seen the Facebook ads promised to Congress, but he and his team saw similar tactics playing out on Twitter and other platforms during the campaign.
With little else to cling to, it appears that investigators – not to mention Trump’s critics – have invested so much in the Facebook interference narrative (not to mention Paul Manafort’s dealings with pro-Russian oligarchs), that admitting they were wrong would just be too damaging.
September 26, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Russophobia | United States |
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