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We have lost a real giant (Stephen F. Cohen has died)!

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God
(Holy Gospel according to Saint Matthew 5:9)

The Saker – September 19, 2020

Dear friends,

It is with immense sadness that I have to report that Stephen F. Cohen passed away yesterday in his home in Manhattan at the age of 81.

There are a few media outlets who have already reported this. Most of them discuss Stephen F. Cohen’s political ideas and his books, which is normal since he was a historian of the Soviet Union. But I won’t do that here.

What I want to say about Cohen is something very different.

First, he was a man of immense kindness and humility. Second, he was a man of total intellectual honesty.  I can’t say that Cohen and I had the same ideas or the same reading of history, though in many cases we did, but here is what I found so beautiful in this man: unlike most of his contemporaries, Cohen was not an ideologue, he did not expect everybody to agree with him, and he himself did not vet people for ideological purity before offering them his friendship.

Even though it is impossible to squeeze a man of such immense intellect and honesty into any one single ideological category, I would say that Stephen Cohen was a REAL liberal, in the original, and noble, meaning of this word.

I also have to mention Stephen Cohen’s immense courage. Yes, I know, Cohen was not deported to GITMO for his ideas, he was not tortured in a CIA secret prison, and he was not rendered to some Third Word country to be tortured there on behalf of the USA.  Stephen Cohen had a different kind of courage: the courage to remain true to himself and his ideals even when the world literally covered him in slanderous accusations, the courage to NOT follow his fellow liberals when they turned PSEUDO-liberals and betrayed everything true liberalism stands for. Professor Cohen also completely rejected any forms of tribalism or nationalism, which often made him the target of vicious hatred and slander, especially from his fellow US Jews (he was accused of being, what else, a Putin agent).

Cohen had the courage to take on the entire ruling elites of this country and their messianic supremacist ideology by himself, almost completely alone.

Last, but most certainly not least, Stephen Cohen was a true peacemaker, in the sense of the words of the Holy Gospel I quoted above. He opposed the warmongering nutcases during the Cold War, and he opposed them again when they replaced their rabid hatred of the Soviet Union with an even more rabid hatred of everything Russian.

I won’t claim here that I always agreed with Cohen’s ideas or his reading of history, and I am quite sure that he would not agree with much of what I wrote. But one thing Cohen and I definitely did agree on: the absolute, number one, priority of not allowing a war to happen between the USA and Russia. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Stephen Cohen dedicated his entire life towards this goal.

If the Nobel Peace Prize meant anything, and if it was at least halfway credible, I would say that Stephen Cohen deserved such a Nobel more than anybody else on this planet.  Instead, he will get his reward in the Heavens.

In Russian we have an Old Testament inspired saying: “город стоит, пока в нем есть хоть один праведник” roughly meaning “a city will stand as long as there remains even one righteous person inside“. I can’t help it but feel that the “city” of the United States has just lost such a righteous person. Yes, there are still a few righteous people left in this “city”, but we all sure lost one of our best contemporaries.

To my immense regret, I never met Professor Cohen personally. And yet, when I heard the news of this death this morning, I felt truly heartbroken. My main consolation is that Cohen died before November and what will inevitably follow. I believe that God took him away from us to spare him the pain of seeing his country collapse under the repeated attacks of pseudo-liberal neocons. Somewhere, I also believe that we, as a society, simply don’t deserve to have such a righteous man amongst us. Cohen is now in much better company.

Thank you, dear Steve, for your kindness and courage.  I shall miss you very, very much!

September 19, 2020 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

On Russia, Joe Biden’s mouth is writing checks the US can’t afford to cash

By Scott Ritter | RT | September 18, 2020

Joe Biden’s tough rhetoric on Russia, fueled by politically motivated FBI testimony alleging continued Russian electoral interference, may play well to his base. But if US allies act on it, it could mean war.

Joe Biden talks a good show. “I believe Russia is an opponent, I really do,” he said at a CNN town hall Thursday night. Biden’s statement was in response to a question from the moderator, Anderson Cooper, as to whether Biden viewed Russia as “an enemy.”

In the world of politicized semantics as used by Joe Biden, the difference between an “opponent” (someone who competes against or fights another; a rival or adversary) and an “enemy” (a person who is actively opposed or hostile to someone or something) knows no differentiation between mens rea (the intention or knowledge of wrongdoing), as opposed actus reus (the actual action or conduct). Both are elements of a crime and, according to Biden, Russia’s actions violate both principles.

“Putin’s overwhelming objective is to break up NATO,” Biden told the made-for-television audience, “to fundamentally alter the circumstance in Europe so he doesn’t have to face an entire NATO contingent.”

Mens Rea.

Biden also called Russia’s alleged election meddling, which FBI Director Christopher Wray recently testified before Congress was “ongoing,” as a “violation of our sovereignty.”

Actus Reus.

The problem here is that while Biden seeks to soften his hardline stance on Russia by using the lesser descriptor “opponent,” the actions he is accusing Russia and its leader, President Vladimir Putin, of committing are de facto elements of a crime, meaning that to anyone listening to Biden’s words, Russia is transformed into an “enemy.”

“Opponents” engage in genteel debates; “enemies” seek to undermine your security and destroy your democracy.

Biden can play fast and loose with words, but at the end of the day, words have meaning, and the picture painted by Biden in his town hall meeting is of a Russian threat to America, and a Russian threat to him personally. “There will be a price to pay,” Biden said of Russia’s actions. “And Putin knows – the reason he doesn’t want me as president, he knows me, and he knows I mean it.”

The personalization of actions which, if true, could be construed as constituting an attack on the United States, is itself disturbing, since it links the political fate of Biden to America’s willingness to stand idle in the face of such perfidy.

Biden is not alone in making such claims. FBI Director Wray appeared to be channeling the Democratic nominee when he told Congress that Russia’s interference in the 2020 presidential race relies heavily on disinformation and agitation designed to make some Americans so angry they support a preferred candidate (Trump) and others so angry and disaffected they don’t vote for another (Biden).

Biden and Wray are both playing to a domestic American audience, and both for political reasons. Biden’s motives are that of a seasoned politician seeking to exploit a predisposition amongst a certain element of the American electorate to accept at face value anything negative said about Russia and/or its president.

Christopher Wray’s motives are more complicated, rooted as they are in the need to restore the FBI’s reputation in the aftermath of the Mueller Report fiasco, the Christopher Steele disaster, and the FISA warrant scandal. By reasserting as fact allegations of Russian political interference in the 2020 presidential election, and claiming ongoing Russian “active measures” in the form of unspecified “disinformation”, Wray seeks to soften the blow of FBI incompetence and malfeasance by resurrecting the Russian threat in a manner designed to make Americans believe that the FBI’s past errors were at least made in good faith while confronting a real enemy… or opponent.

The danger here is not that the United States under a Biden administration would do anything precipitous when it came to dealing with Russia. As Biden himself stated, he knows Russia, and he knows President Putin, and as such he knows the reality of the limits to which Russia can be pushed. Russia is not some petulant child to be punished haphazardly, but a grown man capable of giving as good, or better, than it takes. Joe knows.

But others are listening to the rhetoric who might be fooled into believing that there is substance behind the bluster. Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Georgia – all of these lesser powers today play an oversized role in shaping the US-Russian dynamic, whether by anointing a “true president” in Belarus, dragging their feet on peace in the Donbas, or reigniting the dream of NATO membership by playing host to US forces in large scale military exercises designed to mimic a NATO-like reality.

All it would take in the early weeks and months of a future Biden administration would be for one of these lesser powers to overplay their hand, transitioning the rhetoric of “opposition” into the reality of “war” by pushing Russia too hard. Then Joe Biden would be left holding the bag, having talked the talk, and now being called upon to walk the walk.

But the reality is, Joe Biden’s mouth is writing checks the United States can ill afford to cash. “I don’t mean war,” he told the town hall when talking about how he would respond to alleged Russian perfidy. “But they’ll pay a price… There’ll be an economic price.”

Not if Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Georgia can help it.

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter

September 19, 2020 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Kremlin Spokesman Wonders Why Bottles From Navalny’s Hotel Room Flown Out of Russia

MOSCOW – Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Friday questioned why the items that could serve as evidence in the case of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny were taken out of the country.

“We cannot explain it because you know that this bottle if it existed, was taken out to Germany or elsewhere. What could be the evidence to prove poisoning was transported. It begs the question, why,” Peskov told reporters.

The spokesman added that, according to toxicology experts, if the bottle had traces of nerve agent on it, it would hardly be possible to transport it.

Peskov added that Russia had tried to get the information on the alleged poisoning from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), but this organisation is referring Moscow to Germany, where Navalny is being treated. Germany, in turn, refers Russia to the OPCW.

On Thursday, Navalny’s official Instagram account said that there were traces of Novichok substance — with which he was allegedly poisoned — on bottles from his room in Xander Hotel in the city of Tomsk.

After the staff of Navalny’s Foundation found out he was hospitalised, they called a lawyer, went up to Navalny’s room and began registering, describing and packing everything they saw there, including hotel water bottles.

On 20 August, Navalny fell ill during a domestic Russian flight. He was initially treated in the Siberian city of Omsk, where the plane had to urgently land. Two days later, once the doctors established he was fit for cross-border aerial transportation, the man was flown to the Charite hospital in Germany for further treatment.

Later, the German government said doctors had found traces of a nerve agent from the Novichok group in his system. Moscow responded by pointing out the lack of evidence in Berlin’s claims and noting that Russian doctors had found no toxic substances in Navalny.

The alleged poisoning of Navalny prompted many European officials to call for imposing additional sanctions on Russia. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said Moscow will respond reciprocally if the Western countries impose new sanctions over the Navalny case.

September 18, 2020 Posted by | Russophobia | | Leave a comment

FBI director says Russia is engaged in ‘very active efforts’ to sink Biden & rehashes 2016 claims… but provides no evidence

RT | September 17, 2020

Russia is reprising its still-unproven 2016 election meddling efforts, this time targeting Democratic challenger Joe Biden, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray, who gave no evidence to support his crowd-pleasing claims.

Wray told the House of Representatives that Russia is taking a “very active” role in the 2020 US election, claiming Moscow “continues to try to influence our elections, primarily through what we call malign foreign influence” during a Thursday hearing on national security threats.

According to the FBI director, the Russians’ primary goal seems to be not only to “sow divisiveness and discord,” but to trash Democratic nominee Joe Biden – along with “what the Russians see as a kind of anti-Russian establishment” – through social media, “use of proxies,” state-run media, and “online journals.”

Wray contrasted 2020’s alleged meddling with that of 2016, which he claimed involved “an effort to target election infrastructure,” presenting no evidence to back up either current or past claims – other than that the FBI or other intelligence agencies had made the same claims in the past. There is no actual evidence that Russia interfered with election infrastructure in 2016.

While four years of similarly flavored conspiracy theories blaming Russia for Donald Trump’s 2016 win have come up empty-handed, the paucity of real-world evidence for ‘Russian meddling’ has not stopped Wray and other US intel officials from hyping it up as a major threat to the integrity of the democratic process.

The National Counterintelligence and Security Center suggested last month that, while Russia would interfere in the election in favor of Trump, China and Iran would meddle on behalf of Biden – implying Americans couldn’t vote at all without doing the bidding of a foreign nation.

Former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats even suggested Congress create another election integrity body to supervise the vote in November, apparently concerned the existing authorities – all 54 of them, one for each state plus four federal entities tasked with keeping meddlers, foreign and domestic, shut out – weren’t enough.

Wray insisted the FBI was not only working closely with its state and federal counterparts, but also interfacing on a daily basis with social media companies – though he did not go into detail regarding what information the tech giants were handing over to law enforcement (or vice versa).

During his testimony before Congress, Wray also broke with the Trump administration’s viewpoint on the subject of Antifa, insisting the often-violent leftist group was “more of an ideology than an organization.” However, he admitted “we have seen folks who subscribe or identify with the Antifa movement, who coalesce regionally into small groups or nodes, and they are certainly organized at that level.” Trump has called for Antifa to be declared a terrorist organization.

September 17, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

European Parliament calls for international probe into alleged Navalny poisoning & suspension of Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline

RT | September 17, 2020

The European Parliament has pushed to halt construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Germany and Russia, and for an international investigation into the alleged poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny.

A resolution passed on Thursday called on European Union member states to “continue to isolate Russia in international forums,” encouraging the European Council “to prioritize the approval of the EU Magnitsky-style human rights sanctions” against what it called “the Russian regime.” The ‘Magnitsky’ sanctions are named after a Russian tax auditor, and associate of American-turned-British billionaire Bill Browder, who died in a Moscow prison in 2009.

532 MEPs voted for the resolution, 84 were against and 72 abstained. A total of 688 out of the registered 705 MEPs took part in the voting. It’s important to note that the measure is advisory and not legally binding, but rather intended as an advisory for EU governments.

The European Parliament also reiterated its “previous position to halt the Nord Stream 2 project.” This is a gas pipeline set to connect Germany directly to Russian energy supplies.

“It is necessary to immediately start an international investigation, with the participation of the EU, United Nations, Council of Europe and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons,” the resolution states. It names Alexey Navalny as “a leading Russian opposition politician, lawyer, blogger and anti-corruption activist” who has become “one of the few effective leaders of the Russian opposition.”

The vote on Thursday took place without a debate – there had been discussion on Tuesday in the parliament.

Earlier this month, European Commission President Charles Michel condemned “in the strongest possible terms the attempt to silence opposition leader (sic) Navalny.”

Sanctions against the Russian authorities have been rumored ever since news of Navalny’s alleged poisoning first broke. In late August, US Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun explained that Washington was prepared to take strong measures against Moscow, which would make sanctions related to the 2016 US presidential election “pale in comparison.”

September 17, 2020 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Poland accuses Russian air traffic controllers of DELIBERATELY crashing president’s plane, seeks their arrest

RT | September 16, 2020

Polish prosecutors are now seeking the arrest of three Russian air traffic controllers at the Smolensk-Severny airport, accusing them of deliberately causing the crash that killed President Lech Kaczynski in 2010.

Investigators have “applied to the district court of the Warsaw-Mokotow region with a motion for the temporary arrest” of the three men, Ewa Bialik, spokesperson for the Prosecutor General’s Office, told reporters on Wednesday.

“The charges brought against the air traffic controllers relate to the deliberate provocation of a plane crash that resulted in the death of many people,” she added.

Kaczynski and his wife were among the 96 people on board the Polish Air Force Tu-154M that crashed outside Smolensk on April 10, 2010, while attempting a landing in thick fog. Initial investigations by both Polish and Russian officials found no technical problem with the aircraft, and blamed pilot error.

However, the president’s twin brother Jaroslaw has insisted ever since that the crash was caused by some kind of Russian perfidy. His claim seems to have gained traction in Polish public opinion, as a survey published earlier this year showed 44 percent of Poles considered the plane crash the major “current issue” standing between Warsaw and Moscow.

While he holds no elected office at the moment, Jaroslaw Kaczynski chairs the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, which has been in power since 2015. The current charges against Russian air traffic controllers are based on the claim by Polish investigators from 2018 that traces of explosives were found in the wreckage. However, no such traces were found during the original probe, nor in the soil samples collected at the time.

The Smolensk crash was a massive blow to attempts at patching up Polish-Russian relations. Kaczynski was supposed to attend a commemoration of the Soviet killing of Polish soldiers in Katyn Forest during WWII, an issue that has troubled relations between Moscow and Warsaw ever since.

Under PiS rule, Poland has repeatedly clashed with Russia on the diplomatic level, while urging fellow NATO states to permanently station troops on its territory. However, Warsaw has also fought numerous political battles with the EU, which has objected to PiS policies that conflicted with values officially embraced by Brussels.

September 16, 2020 Posted by | Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Germany Reportedly Offered Washington LNG Investment Worth $1.2Bln to Save Nord Stream 2

By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik  –

Nord Stream 2, a joint venture between European energy companies and Russia’s Gazprom, has battled challenges such as obtaining clearances from involved countries and US sanctions. It now faces threats from the German government to halt construction over Russia’s purported role in the yet-to-be-proven poisoning of opposition figure Alexei Navalny.

Germany had reportedly offered to invest up to 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion) in terminals for liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the United States as a way of saving the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, targeted by Washington’s sanctions, according to sources cited by Die Zeit newspaper.

The non-official proposal is suggested as having been sent by the German Finance Ministry on 7 August, before Washington imposed sanctions on companies involved in the project.

In a letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, cited by Die Zeit, German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz reportedly vowed to earmark close to 1 billion euros in funding for the construction of LNG terminals if Washington agreed to abandon sanctions targeting firms involved in Nord Stream 2. The LNG terminals in question were to be built at two locations on the North Sea coast.

“In return, the United States will allow the construction and operation of Nord Stream 2 to proceed unhindered. The US will not exercise its legal scope for sanctions,” Die Zeit quoted the letter as saying.

Other proposals included in the cited paper allegedly pertained to a gas transit contract for Ukraine and the financing of an alternative pipeline and a terminal that would allow Poland to use the US LNG.

A spokesman for the German Finance Ministry did not offer an official comment on the report.

Challenge-Riddled Mega-Project

The Nord Stream 2 mega-project, worth $10.5 billion, is a joint venture funded by Russia’s Gazprom and five EU energy giants, Uniper, Wintershall, OMV, Engie, and Royal Dutch Shell, that will ultimately be capable of pumping around 55 billion cubic metres of gas annually from Russia to Germany and the rest of Europe.

Despite long being defended by its participants as a purely economic venture rather than a political one, the 1,230 km pipeline project has been forced to tackle a plethora of challenges, ranging from negotiating operating terms and obtaining clearances from the involved countries, to US sanctions, imposed in December 2019 against a key contractor, Switzerland-based AllSeas.

The sanctions outlined in the 2020 National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) came as the Nord Stream 2 project had just 160 km left to build.

Washington has long claimed that the Nord Stream 2 project would leave Ukraine without money from Russian gas transit, while making Europe dependent on Russian gas. The EU and Russia have denied these allegations, insisting that the project is purely an economic one.

The US has also been driven by ambitions to sell Germany and Eastern Europe its more expensive, tanker-delivered liquefied natural gas.

The pipeline envisions doubling the existing 55 billion cubic meters of gas per year capacity of the Nord Stream network once completed, and is set to make Germany a major energy hub.

Only recently, the project has been forced to deal with another threat to its existence, amid suggested sanctions against the joint venture after German authorities accused Moscow of being the culprit in the purported poisoning of political activist Alexei Navalny.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has reportedly told officials that “a final decision has not been taken” on the future of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, as Washington has pressured Berlin to cancel the project, with Warsaw actively supporting the stance.

Polish government spokesman Piotr Muller fed into the speculations surrounding the future of Nord Stream 2, asserting that Poland was ready to offer Germany access to its Baltic Pipe gas pipeline project instead.

Baltic Pipe is a proposed 800-950 km natural gas pipeline between Poland and oil-rich Norwegian waters in the North Sea which is not yet under construction that Warsaw hopes to see completed by October 2022.

Since last week’s announcement that the Navalny case would be treated as an “attempted murder by poisoning”, the German government has faced pressure to scrap the Nord Stream 2 project, with some German lawmakers and several of Berlin’s foreign allies suggesting abandoning the nearly finished pipeline to ‘punish’ Russia, despite no proof having been provided to substantiate the allegations.

September 16, 2020 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Dark web voter database report casts new doubts on Russian election hack narrative

By Gareth Porter | Grayzone | September 13, 2020

A new report showing that US state-level voter databases were publicly available calls into question the narrative that Russian intelligence “targeted” US state election-related websites in 2016.

A September 1 report in the Moscow daily Kommersant on a “dark web” site offering a database of personal information on millions of registered American voters undermines one of the central themes of the Russia hysteria pervading US politics.

Democratic politicians and corporate media pundits have long accepted it as fact that Russian intelligence “targeted” US state election-related websites in 2016. But the Kommersant report shows that those state registered voter databases were already available to anyone in the public domain, eliminating any official Russian motive for hacking state websites.

Kommersant reported that a user on a dark web Forum known as Gorka9 offered free access to databases containing the information of 7.6 million Michigan voters, along with the state voter databases of Connecticut, Arkansas, Florida and North Carolina.

There are differences between the Michigan database described by Gorka9 and the one that the State of Michigan releases to the public upon request. Tracy Wimmer, the spokesperson for the Michigan Secretary of State, said in an e-mail to Grayzone that when the Michigan voter registration database is released to the public upon request, the state withholds “date of birth (year of birth is included), driver’s license number, the last four digits of someone’s social security number, email address and phone number….”  However, Gorka9’s description of the Michigan data includes driver’s license numbers, full dates of birth, social security numbers and emails.

In fact both un-redacted and redacted state voter files are obviously widely available on the dark web as well as elsewhere on the internet. Meduza, a Russian-language news site based in Riga, Latvia, published the Kommersant story along with an “anonFiles” download portal for access to the Michigan voter database and a page from it showing that it is the officially redacted version. The DHS and the FBI both acknowledged in response to the Kommersant story that “a lot of voter registration data is publicly available or easily purchased.”

Criminal hackers have been seeking to extract such personal information from online state personal databases for many years — not only from voter registration databases but from drivers license, health care and other databases. Oregon’s chief information security officer, Lisa Vasa, told the Washington Post in September 2017 that her team blocks “upwards of 14 million attempts to access our network every day.”

Ken Menzell, the legal counsel to the Illinois state Board of Elections, told this writer in a 2017 interview that the only thing new about the hack of the state’s voter database in 2016, in which personal data on 200,000 Illinois registered voters was exfiltrated, was that the hackers succeeded. Menzell recalled that hackers had been “trying constantly” to get into every Illinois personal database ever since 2006.

The motive for the hackers was simple: as observed by Andrey Arsentiev, the head of analytics and special projects at the private security partnership, Infowatch, databases can be mined for profits on the dark web, primarily by selling them to scam artists working on a mass scale. Gorka9 was offering state voter files for free because the owner had already squeezed all the potential profit out of selling them.

For the Russian government, on the other hand, such databases would be of little or no value. When FBI counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap was asked by a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2017 how Moscow might use personal voter registration data, the only explanation he could come up with was that the Russian government and its intelligence agencies were completely ignorant of the character of U.S. state voter databases. “They took the data to understand what it consisted of,” Priestap declared.

Priestap was obviously unaware of the absurdity of the suggestion that the Russian government had no idea what was in such databases in 2016. After all, the state voter registration databases had already been released by the states themselves into the public domain, and had been bought and sold on the dark web for many years. The FBI has steered clear of the embarrassing suggestion by Priestap ever since.

Priestap’s inability to conjure up a plausible reason for Russia to hack U.S. election sites points to the illogical and baseless nature of the claims of a Russian threat to the U.S. presidential election.

DHS creates the Russian cyber campaign against state election sites

Back in 2016, the Department of Homeland Security did its best to market the narrative of Russian infiltration of American voting systems. At the time, the DHS was seeking to increase its bureaucratic power by adding election infrastructure to its portfolio of cybersecurity responsibilities, and exploiting the Russian factor was just the ticket to supercharge their campaign.

In their prepared statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2017, two senior DHS officials, Samuel Liles and Jeanette Manfra, referred to an October 2016 intelligence report published by the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis. They stated it had “established that Internet-connected election-related networks, including websites, in 21 states were potentially targeted by Russian government cyber actors.” That “potentially targeted” language gave away the fact that DHS didn’t have anything more than suspicion to back up the charge.

In fact DHS was unable to attribute any attempted election site hack to the Russian government. On October 7, 2016, in fact, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper stated explicitly that they could not do so. Liles and Manfra appeared to imply such an attribution, however, by associating DHS with a joint assessment by CIA, FBI and NSA released January 7, 2017, that contained the statement, the “Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards.”

But the meaning of that language was deliberately vague, and the only additional sentence related to it stated, “Since early 2014, Russian intelligence has researched US electoral processes and related technology and equipment.” That was far from any finding that Russia had scanned or hacked election-related websites.

In September 2017, under pressure from governors, DHS finally notified state governments about the cyber incidents that it had included in its October 2016 intelligence report as examples of “potential” Russian targeting. Now, it abandoned its ambiguous language and explicitly claimed Russian responsibility.

One state election official who asked not to be identified told this writer in a 2018 interview that “a couple of guys from DHS reading from a script” had informed him that his state was “targeted by Russian government cyber actors.”

DHS spokesman Scott McConnell issued a statement on September 28, 2017 that DHS “stood by” its assessment that 21 states “were the target of Russian government cyber actors seeking vulnerabilities and access to U.S. election infrastructure.” But McConnell also revealed that DHS had defined “targeting” so broadly that any public website that a hacker scanned in a state could be included within that definition.

The dishonest tactics the DHS employed to demonstrate plausible evidence of “targeting” was revealed by Arizona Secretary of State Michelle Reagan’s spokesperson Matt Roberts, who told this writer in an interview, “When we pressed DHS on what exactly was targeted, they said it was the Phoenix public library’s computer system.” Another 2016 hacking episode in Arizona, which the FBI originally believed was a Russian government job, was later found to be a common criminal hack. In that episode, a hacker had targeted a local official with a phishing scheme and managed to steal their username and password.

Ironically, DHS had speculated in its initial intelligence report “that cyber operations targeting election infrastructure could be intended or used to undermine public confidence in electoral processes and potentially the outcome.”

That speculation, reiterated by corporate media, became a central feature of the Russiagate hysteria that electrified the Democratic Party’s base. None of the journalists and politicians who repeated the narrative stopped to consider how unsubstantiated claims by the DHS about Russian penetration of the US election infrastructure was doing just that – lowering public confidence in the democratic process.

The hysteria surrounding the supposed Russian threat to elections is far from over. The Senate Intelligence Committee report released in July 2019 sought to legitimize the contention by former Obama cyber security adviser Michael Daniel that Russia “may have” targeted all fifty states for cyber attacks on election-related sites.  In explaining his reasoning to the Senate committee’s staff, Daniel said: “My professional judgment was we have to work on the assumption [Russians] tried to go everywhere, because they’re thorough, they’re competent, they’re good.”

The New York Times eagerly played up that subjective and highly ideological judgment in the lede of a story headlined, ‘Russia Targeted Election Systems in All 50 States, Report Finds.’

As for DHS, it appeared to acknowledge by implication in an October 11, 2018 assessment excerpted in the Senate Committee report that it could not distinguish between a state-sponsored hack and a criminal hack. This August, the senior cybersecurity adviser for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Matthew Masterson, said, “We are not and have not seen specific targeting of those election systems that has been attributable to nation-state actors at this time….  We do see regular scanning, regular probing of election infrastructure as a whole, what you’d expect to see as you run IT systems.”

Despite these stunning admissions, DHS has faced no official accountability for deliberately slanting its intelligence assessment to implicate Russia for common criminal hacking activity. No matter how shoddy its origins and development have proven to be, the narrative remains too politically useful to be allowed to die.

September 16, 2020 Posted by | Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Exhaustive Pentagon Review Finds No Evidence For NYTimes’ “Russian Bounties” Story

By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 09/14/2020

There’s been huge efforts to validate The New York Times “bombshell” that wasn’t — concerning its summer reporting that Russia secretly offered bounties to the Taliban to kill US troops in Afghanistan.

Two months ago the Pentagon vowed to get to the bottom of it, launching a review of all intelligence and sources which might provide corroboration. And now at the end of that investigation Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command overseeing the war in Afghanistan, says the detailed investigation found no corroboration of the story.

Recall that from the start the whole thing smelled like a dramatic and desperate last ditch effort to revive the failed Russiagate narrative but in a different form. Multiple intelligence agency heads voiced their immediate skepticism in the wake of the claims linked to unnamed intelligence sources in the CIA.

The new NBC report, published Monday, finds further:

A U.S. military official familiar with the intelligence added that after a review of the intelligence around each attack against Americans going back several years, none have been tied to any Russian incentive payments.

The suggestion of a Russian bounty program began, another source directly familiar with the matter said, with a raid by CIA paramilitary officers that captured Taliban documents describing Russian payments.

So there it is: the Pentagon did a detailed examination of each and every attack on American troops going back several years and found nothing.

September 14, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

French progressive outlet says Twitter falsely labeled it ‘RUSSIAN STATE MEDIA’ after Russiagate report

By Nebojsa Malic | RT | September 14, 2020

Right after running a story criticizing the French coverage of ‘Russiagate,’ a progressive Euroskeptic outlet got labeled by Twitter as Russian state-affiliated media. A case of mistaken identity, or content-based censorship?

Ruptures is a French journal that describes itself as progressive and “radically Eurocritical.” It has been around for almost 20 years, changing its name from Bastille-République-Nations to Ruptures in 2015.

Less than an hour after publishing a story about the French media coverage of ‘Russiagate’ – the entirely unsubstantiated claim about US President Donald Trump colluding with Moscow during the 2016 elections – last week, Ruptures found itself labeled “Russian state-affiliated media” by Twitter.

Ruptures immediately reached out to Twitter France and protested that this label was a calumny of their “independent, subscriber-funded monthly,” journalist Lauren Daure told RT in an email.

“No explanations so far from Twitter despite our requests,” Daure added.

Twitter instituted the labeling program on August 6, but only for select outlets – those operated by the US, UK, French or German governments, for example, somehow escaped the designation. Twitter also said that accounts thus designated will not be promoted through its recommendation systems, such as “home timeline, notifications, and search.”

In practice, this severely limits the visibility of the designated accounts, while the label itself serves to “intimidate” the readers – according to none other than the head of Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty. Admittedly, she was commenting on a proposed Russian rule that would simply label her outlet – part of the US government’s global broadcasting system – as a foreign agent, without any restrictions on visibility.

That’s the jam Ruptures finds itself in, and no one – at Twitter or elsewhere – has offered any reason as to why. The possibilities range from ridiculous to sinister. In what could be a case of mistaken identity, perhaps someone at Twitter France made a category error and conflated Ruptures with Ruptly, the video news agency that’s part of the RT family.

While that is bad enough, the other option is infinitely worse: that someone at Twitter France decided Ruptures amounted to “Russian state-affiliated media” based on the content of their article about ‘Russiagate.’ Then there is the fact that Ruptures’ editor-in-chief Pierre Levy once had an op-ed published on RT Russian – way back in October 2017! – about sanctions as information warfare.

Whatever the reason, the label effectively amounts to “soft” censorship of Ruptures. It also goes far beyond what US laws envisioned as acting “in good faith” when they made platforms like Twitter immune from legal liability (in the controversial Section 230). At the very least, Twitter owes Ruptures an explanation. A week after they were branded, they’re still waiting.

September 14, 2020 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Unipolar Spin: Why Imperial Leftists Vilify Russia’s Social Democracy

By Joaquin Flores | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 14, 2020

A lie told a thousand times becomes the truth. In reading countless articles from the Atlantic Council press outlets (NYT, WaPo, VICE News, et al), we take for granted that modern Russia is a right-wing regime controlled by an authoritarian personality bent on total domination. As a result, the debate then gets framed on why or whether its right for leftists to attack it as such, since this is used to further justify collective punishment (sanctions) against a whole people.

What escapes us is why creating propaganda that will result in collective punishment is in any way the business of self-declared leftists in the first place. Historically, it hadn’t been, which raises big questions about who is really controlling the narrative and providing career paths and publishing opportunities for those who posture on the radical, even ‘anarchist’ left. We all know what happened to the self-imploded reputation of the Trotskyist Christopher Hitchens, that war-criminal scoundrel who offered some kind of left-cover for the crown’s imperial pretensions in Iraq. Millions died in part as a direct product of his work. Those who didn’t attend his funeral will tell you why.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that Russia is a social democracy, a fact erased from the collective understanding as a result of the insidious psychological operation being carried out on western audiences and Russians alike.

The End of Globalization: Unipolar Panic at the Rise of Multipolarity

The broader geopolitical problem for unipolar trans-Atlanticism is that much of the rest of the world has nearly caught up to the U.S. The unipolar moment is over, and multipolarity has arrived. This is a growing success and a great achievement for the people of Asia, Latin America, the Middle-East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. All wars and coups the U.S. has engaged in since the end of WWII were aimed at suppressing this multipolar eventuality. And yet multipolarity, as explained through the Atlantic Council and its imperial leftist scribes, is deceitfully presented as a neo-fascist threat to the people of the world, and one promoted uniquely by Russia. This would come as a surprise to the BRICS countries, and all those in their peripheries. It would defy the logic of Mercosur and the Sucre that these were established by sovereign state in Latin America at great cost, through the decades of surviving Washington Consensus dictatorships and the rule of U.S. Steel and the United Fruit Company, only to hand it to Moscow for now particular reason.

And yet this stands at the heart of vilifying Russia’s social democracy.

That multipolarity is a ‘Russian project’ is truly the most incoherent and chauvinistic geopolitical conspiracy theory in modern times, reminiscent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Narcissist Gaslighting

The rampant xenophobia that is allowed in the toxic Atlanticist press will no doubt be the subject of debate when those individuals soon lose their careers and livelihoods, because being a talentless hack makes one highly expendable. And this border-line racism and national chauvinism against a whole people and their representative government is increasingly being aired in broad daylight.

No, the waters won’t part, up will not become down, and the elites promoting a soft-power war on Russia won’t be overthrown. But their replaceable media-minions, who become too much of a liability with all the bad PR, will certainly be disappeared and erased.

We can set aside that Russophobic hate scribbling performed concertedly appears like an Operation Mockingbird psy-op, and yes, we can even ignore that over forty years ago the Church Commission revealed that the legacy newspapers have the international sections and editorials of their publications reviewed, approved, and even directly written by CIA agents and assets.

We can leave even alone that these are seemingly managed through a network of seemingly independent news and opinion outlets which nevertheless parrot each other’s talking points on the righteousness of NATO expansionism, the evils of Russia and Putin, and are organized under an Atlantic Council mandate.

What a perfect match, one no doubt made in heaven – to posture as some holier than thou concerned citizen of abuses around the world while in fact doing little more than feeding a crypto-nationalist media ecosystem bent on weapons sales and big ticket contracts for the U.S. military industrial complex. With enough self-delusion or narcissistic supply, they can even imagine that this is not what’s going on. One would imagine that it’s Russia, not the U.S. with 800 bases around the world. This is truly sick gaslighting, and all the well-paid flying monkeys are deployed with the named aim of doing just that.

Follow the Money – Promote Russophobia, Win Prizes

The Atlantic Council related publications which continue these Operation Mockingbird-like methods, have employed a number of ethically compromised imperial left-wing radicals to do the dirty work of gaslighting the American public on the political and socio-economic nature of countries being targeted by the U.S.

We can see from the evidence that the motley crew of imperial leftist Russophobes are those who aspire to be blue-check mark people on twitter and have regular opportunities at Atlantic Council approved publications. They want to be fast-tracked to full tenure in the increasingly partisan humanities and social sciences departments of various colleges and universities, and do the book writing and speaking tour gig. This is a relatively easy formula: virtue signal on domestic wedge issues like gender and race while ignoring class issues that would otherwise cause discomfort for their financiers, simultaneously doubling down on Atlantic Council approved Russophobia using those wedge issues – meanwhile ignoring or obfuscating the larger socioeconomic and geopolitical questions that provide more context and clarity.

After this storm has passed, it will be the subject of many books written by numerous historians, how and why it came to be that in the climate of virtue signaling political correctness, the only approved form of national chauvinism and borderline-racist conspiracy theories was Russophobic in nature. Those who engaged in it, while being creatures of their time and place, will be condemned and marginalized for the xenophobes that they were.

Their method, which is as dangerous to the left as it is misinformative to the public at large, is to use radical left criticisms of countries the U.S. is targeting for regime change and sanctions, even though there are effectively no countries (including most obviously the plutocratic U.S.) that meet their anarchoid standard. But by arbitrarily using an anarchist yard stick to measure the political correctness of some other country, they can issue these leftoid fatwas and make it so appear that Russia is uniquely problematic.

And the personal motivations of egomania aside, we only need to follow the money. And for our purposes today, just a fraction of it. Between George Soros’ Open Societies Foundation and the National Endowment for Democracy’s lucrative grants, The MacArthur Foundation, there are hundreds of millions of dollars being thrown at this soft-power endeavor.

Outside of philanthropy are the huge sums paid to ‘journalists’ and ‘authors’ directly by the billionaire blogs themselves, no doubt doing their part for Operation Mockingbird. You can bet your bottom dollar that the life of a collective-punishment-advocating ‘leftist’ in the employ of empire is neither a difficult nor impoverished one. They may appear homely, bookish, even shabby in their social media presentation, but that is part of the illusion, the veneer. Within the demented aesthetic-sphere of Anglophone left-radicalism, projecting depressiveness is akin to projecting virtue – an odd carryover from Puritanism. But in truth, they are neither hungry nor intellectual. They are well paid actors, and those who believe them have been duped.

Russia is the target of an ongoing campaign to vilify its leadership, with no shortage of tropes and dog whistling that this is an inherent feature of Russian culture itself. Like black-face, comedic ethnic impersonations are all but banned in the public sphere, unless it is of a Russian. The trope is so pervasive that even those trying to speak in the name of decreasing tensions, often frame their commentary in the name of peace by accepting that premise; that Russianness is inherently corrupt, misogynistic, authoritarian, and aggressive.

It is this very premise which must be challenged. The funny thing is, this task isn’t too difficult.

The Elastic Overton Window

By which rubric, by which method, do we compare the reality of a targeted country like Russia to what is possible or even desirable?

Anarchist theory is ‘fantastic’ because anything one compares it to will necessarily fall short. It is reminiscent of Trotskyist criticisms of nominally socialist states, or Salafist criticisms of countries already within the Ummah. These societies, by definition, have to fall short because the self-declared ‘revolutionary’ nature of these belief systems must characterize anything short of their unattainable ideal as being a critical failure.

When it comes to assessing the reality of Russia’s cultural and sociopolitical system, the Overton Window of social acceptability is magically moved to the radical end of the anarchist left when Russia is the subject, for the forced result that we find Russia to be double-plus ungood, despite that those penning these pieces come from a country (the U.S.) far to the right on the socioeconomic matters which effect real working people.

The U.S. is Far to the right of Russia? Yes, we’ll explain

The fact that ski mask wearing anarchists are not free to run naked whilst flinging frozen chickens through kindergartens or Easter church services, is presented as evidence that Russia is an authoritarian state. The fact that Russia is a country, with a culture and history it finds worthy of being taught in schools, and with borders, and a standing army (!!) are taken as proof positive that Russia fulfills most of Umberto Eco’s ’14 Signs of Fascism’. And yet until last Tuesday, these were just understood of part of the fabric that makes a UN member-state … a UN member-state.

Every other country on earth has a school curriculum, has laws on public decency, and teaches the country’s narrative in its school system. When every other country is looked at, we are encouraged to see ‘normal’, and we apply a non-anarchist yard stick to measure it up. When it’s Russia, everything is problematized using every epithet from the critical school glossary. It is interesting, but upon close examination not strange, that these writers are able to get away with it. They do after all have the full support of the world’s last unipolar empire behind them.

The job of these writers is to misinform the left, and to turn the politics of class struggle into the politics of xenophobic national rivalry – a quintessential aspect of classical fascism. That they use apparently politically correct talking points couched within the framework of human rights, and terms borrowed from the vocabulary of the new-left is beside the point.

We must look instead at the perennial meta-political essence of that endeavor and not the particular forms it takes based upon the political or linguistic fashions of the day. The fact that we are better informed to understand fascism through the lens of a meta-political essence, points to a very big theoretical problem in the work of both Umberto Eco and Roger Griffin, as their entire composite heuristic explanatory paradigm is challenged in so doing.

It probably escapes people after that barrage of disinformation and national chauvinism parading as left-wing critique, that Russia is a social-democratic society.

It is Russia, not the United States that has universal healthcare and university education, vast public housing and useful programs for the disadvantaged, a multi-party parliamentary democracy, early retirement (60 m, 55 f), nearly two years leave with pay for new mothers. Russia, like any other social democracy also has strong workplace protections against discrimination, a vigorous labor movement (35% union density in a formal workforce of 70 million), and codified rights for ethnic, linguistic and religious groups, and a no-holds barred private/citizen media complex that regularly attacks the country’s leaders and exposes the inevitable corruption that comes with large-scale societies and market systems.

Putin Serves the Russian Oligarchy Poorly – A Question of Democracy

While less-than-honest critics would say that Russia’s social democracy is merely a ‘carry-over’ from Russia’s former Soviet system, it begs the question: why nearly thirty years later, twenty-some of which being under Putin’s ‘right-wing oligarchy’, are these still soundly in place?

We are pressed with a difficult dilemma in the Russophobic narrative: Either Putin is the tyrannical tool of a rapacious oligarchy that has nevertheless failed to destroy Russia’s social democracy in 20 years, or Putin uses his vast powers to maintain its progressive social system against the right-wing oligarchy. In either event, the Swiss cheese that is the imperial left’s Russophobic narrative is evidently pungent.

Putin has been elected – and continues to win elections – for the past two decades. Isn’t this indicative of some large problem in the narrative? This is a question we have to turn on its head: why, in the U.S., have we taken for granted that our elected leaders should expectedly let us down and fail in their mandate with such prejudice that we want to throw them out every four or eight years? Why, in the west, has democracy been defined as dissatisfaction built upon betrayal?

How would a democratic society respond to a government that has, on the balance, solved and continued to solve the problems arising from the collapse of its former authoritarian self? Would they respond by throwing that government out, or by re-electing it?

This is not to view Russia through rose-tinted glasses, or to ignore the problems that it has: largely similar problems that face the world in the context of global capitalism. Russia has problems in wealth inequality, as well as too high an incarceration rate – though still one that pales in comparison to the U.S. by nearly half. But our view is offered knowing that such criticisms are so vast in their abundance, and so mandatory in every western publication, that not fixating on these here in no way obstructs audiences from accessing them elsewhere. What we bring is some balance and perspective.

What characterizes Russia’s social democracy are things which the left-most wing of the Democrat Party in the U.S., led by figures like Bernie Sanders, would consider absolute victories to achieve. And yet nevertheless we are confronted with a media barrage that blindsides us with misinformation to the extent that this basic truth is lost upon us. Fortunately, that tide is turning and will turn all the faster as we understand the reality of modern Russia through a sober and honest lens.

September 14, 2020 Posted by | Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Germany claims French & Swedish labs ‘confirmed’ Navalny’s Novichok poisoning, as Macron labels incident ‘attempted murder’

RT | September 14, 2020

The German government claimed on Monday that the presence of a substance from the Novichok family of poisons in the system of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny has now been confirmed by three different laboratories.

Two of them are its European Union partners France and Sweden, according to Berlin, which says it has brought in the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to analyze the samples. Officials renewed their demand that Russia explain the incident.

“The federal government involved the OPCW in the analysis of evidence from the Navalny case. The OPCW took samples from Navalny and took the necessary steps to study them in its laboratories,” a German government statement read. “The federal government has also asked its European partners France and Sweden to conduct an independent study. The results of these tests are now available and confirm the German evidence. Independent of the ongoing OPCW investigations, three laboratories have now independently demonstrated the presence of a nerve agent from the Novichok group as the cause of Mr. Navalny’s poisoning.”

The head of German intelligence, Bruno Kahl, said last week that the poison used was stronger than previously known. This raised eyebrows in Russia, given that previous variants of Novichok were supposed to have been devastatingly lethal, and Navalny has survived his alleged poisoning.

“We again call on Russia to explain what happened. We are in close contact with our European partners regarding further steps,” the statement continued.

Meanwhile, after the French tests, French state-run news wire AFP reported that President Emmanuel Macron urged his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to urgently shed light on what he called the “attempted murder” of Navalny.

On September 9, the German Ministry of Defense announced that samples taken from Navalny had been transferred to the OPCW. Moscow has complained about a lack of cooperation from Berlin.

On August 20, a plane carrying Navalny made an emergency landing in Omsk after he suddenly became unwell on a flight from Siberia to Moscow. The anti-corruption activist was taken to hospital, placed in an induced coma, and put on a ventilator. On August 22, he was flown to Germany for treatment.

German doctors said on August 24 that they had found signs of Navalny having been poisoned with substances from the cholinesterase inhibitors group. They added that there was no threat to his life, but there was a possibility there would be long-term effects on his nervous system.

September 14, 2020 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

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