The WannaCry Cyberattack: What the Evidence Says and Why the Trump Administration Blames North Korea
By Gregory Elich | CounterPunch | January 3, 2018
On December 19, in a Wall Street Journal editorial that drew much attention, Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert asserted that North Korea was “directly responsible” for the WannaCry cyberattack that struck more than 300,000 computers worldwide. The virus encrypted files on infected computers and demanded payment in return for supposedly providing a decryption key to allow users to regain access to locked files. Bossert charged that North Korea was “using cyberattacks to fund its reckless behavior and cause disruption across the world.” [1]
At a press conference on the same day, Bossert announced that the attribution was made “with evidence,” and that WannaCry “was directed by the government of North Korea,” and carried out by “actors on their behalf, intermediaries.” The evidence that led to the U.S. to that conclusion? Bossert was not saying, perhaps recalling the ridicule that greeted the FBI and Department of Homeland Security’s misbegotten report on the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. [2] “Press Briefing on the Attribution of the WannaCry Malware Attack to North Korea,” Whitehouse.gov, December 19, 2017.
The centerpiece of the claim of North Korean culpability is the similarity in code between the Contopee malware, which opens backdoor access to an infected computer, and code in an early variant of WannaCry. [3]
Contopee has been linked to the Lazarus group, a cybercrime organization that some believe launched the Sony hack, based on the software tools used in that attack. Since North Korea is widely considered to be behind the cyberattack on Sony, at first glance that would appear to seal the argument.
It is a logical argument, but is it founded on valid premises? Little is known about Lazarus, aside from the operations that are attributed to it. The link between Lazarus and North Korea is a hypothesis based on limited evidence. It may or may not be true, but the apparent linkage is far weaker than mainstream media’s conviction would have one believe. Lazarus appears to be an independent organization possibly based in China, which North Korea may or may not have contracted to perform certain operations. That does not necessarily mean that every action – or even any action at all – Lazarus performs is at North Korea’s behest.
In Bossert’s mind as well as that of media reporters, Lazarus – the intermediaries Bossert refers to – and North Korea are synonymous when it comes to cyber operations. North Korea gives the orders and Lazarus carries them out. James Scott, a senior fellow at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, notes that “speculation concerning WannaCry attributes the malware to the Lazarus Group, not to North Korea, and even those connections are premature and not wholly convincing. Lazarus itself has never been definitively proven to be a North Korean state-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT); in fact, an abundance of evidence suggests that the Lazarus group may be a sophisticated, well-resourced, and expansive cyber-criminal and occasional cyber-mercenary collective.” Furthermore, Scott adds, the evidence used to tie Lazarus to North Korea, “such as an IP hop or some language indicators, are circumstantial and could even be intentional false flags” to misdirect investigators. [4]
Whether an association exists or not between Lazarus and North Korea has little meaning regarding a specific attack. Joseph Carson of Thycotic emphasizes “that it is important to be clear that [Lazarus] is a group and motives can change depending on who is paying. I have found when researching hacking groups they can one day be working for one government under one alias and another using a different alias. This means that association in cyberspace means nothing.” [5]
It is considered a particularly damning piece of evidence that some of the tools used in an early variant of WannaCry share characteristics with those deployed in the cyberattack on Sony. [6] However, there is ample cause for doubting North Korea’s role in the Sony hack, as I have written about before. [7] Following the Sony breach, IT businessman John McAfee revealed that he had contact with the group that attacked Sony. “It has to do with a group of hackers” motivated by dislike of the movie industry’s “controlling the content of art,” he said, and the FBI was wrong in attributing the attack to North Korea. [8]
If attribution of the Sony hack to North Korea does not hold up, then linkage based on tool usage falls apart.
Once malware is deployed, it often appears for sale on the Dark Web, where it can be purchased by cybercriminals. The reuse of code is a time-saving measure in building new threats. Indeed, malware can find its way onto the market quite rapidly, and almost as soon as WannaCry was wreaking havoc back in May, it was reported that “researchers are already finding variants” of WannaCry “in the wild.” [9]
According to Peter Stephenson of SC Media, “The most prevailing [theory] uses blocks of code that were part of known Korean hacks appearing in the WannaCry code as justification for pinning the attacks on NK. That’s really not enough. These blocks of code are readily available in the underground and get reused regularly.” [10]
Commonality of tool usage means less than we are led to believe. “While malware may initially be developed and used by a single actor,” Digital Shadows explains, “this does not mean that it will permanently remain unique to that actor. Malware samples might be accidentally or intentionally leaked, stolen, sold, or used in independent operations by individual members of the group.” [11]
“Shared code is not the same as attribution. Code can be rewritten and erased by anyone, and shared code is often reused,” observes Patrick Howell O’Neill of Cyberscoop. “The same technique could potentially be used to frame another group as responsible for a hack but, despite a lot of recent speculation, there is no definitive proof.” [12]
None of the shared code was present in WannaCry’s widespread attack on May 12. Although it is more likely than not that the same actor was behind the early variants of WannaCry and the May version, it is not certain. Alan Woodward, cybersecurity advisor to Europol, points out, “It is quite possible for even a relatively inexperienced group to obtain the malicious WannaCry payload and to have repackaged this. Hence, the only thing actually tying the May attacks to the earlier WannaCry attacks is the payload, which criminals often copy.” [13]
The most devastating component WannaCry utilized in its May 12 attack is EternalBlue, an exploit of Windows vulnerabilities that was developed by the National Security Agency and leaked by Shadow Brokers. The NSA informed Microsoft of the vulnerability only after it learned of the software’s theft. According to Bossert, the NSA informs software manufacturers about 90 percent of the time when it discovers a vulnerability in operating software. It keeps quiet about the remaining ten percent so that it can “use those vulnerabilities to develop exploits for the purpose of national security for the classified work we do.” [14] Plainly put, the NSA intentionally leaves individuals and organizations worldwide exposed to potential security breaches so that it can conduct its own cyber operations. This is less than reassuring.
The May variant of WannaCry also implemented DoublePulsar, which is a backdoor implant developed by the NSA that allows an attacker to gain full control over a system and load executable malware.
The two NSA-developed components are what allowed WannaCry to turn virulent last May. After loading, EternalBlue proceeds to infect every other vulnerable computer on the same network. It simultaneously generates many thousands of random IP addresses and launches 128 threads at two-second intervals, seeking vulnerabilities in computers that it can exploit at each one of the generated external IP addresses.[15]
China and Russia were among the nations that were most negatively impacted by the malware. [16] WannaCry initially targeted Russian systems, which would seem an odd thing for North Korea to do, given that Russia and China are the closest things it has to allies. [17]
Digital Shadows reports that “the malware appeared to spread virtually indiscriminately with no control by its operators,” and a more targeted approach “would have been more consistent with the activities of a sophisticated criminal outfit or a technically-competent nation-state actor.” [18]
Flashpoint analyzed the ransom note that appeared on infected computers. There were two Chinese versions and an English version. The Chinese texts were written by someone who is fluent, and the English by someone with a strong but imperfect command of English. Ransom notes in other languages were apparently translated from the English version using Google translator. [19] It has been pointed out that this fact does not disprove the U.S. attribution of North Korea, as that nation could have hired Chinese cybercriminals. True enough, but then North Korea does not have a unique ability to do so. If so inclined, anyone could contract Chinese malware developers. Or cybercriminals could act on their own.
Lazarus and North Korean cyber actors have a reputation for developing sophisticated code. The hallmark of WannaCry, however, is its sheer sloppiness, necessitating the release of a series of new versions in fairly quick succession. Alan Woodward believes that WannaCry’s poorly designed code reveals that it had been written by “a less than experienced malware developer.” [20]
Important aspects of the code were so badly bungled that it is difficult to imagine how any serious organization could be responsible.
IT security specialists use virtual machines, or sandboxes, to safely test and analyze malware code. A well-designed piece of malware will include logic to detect the type of environment it is executing in and alter its performance in a virtual machine (VM) environment to appear benign. WannaCry was notably lacking in that regard. “The authors did not appear to be concerned with thwarting analysis, as the samples analyzed have contained little if any obfuscation, anti-debugging, or VM-aware code,” notes LogRhythm Labs. [21]
James Scott argues that “every WannaCry attack has lacked the stealth, sophistication, and resources characteristic of [Lazarus sub-group] Bluenoroff itself or Lazarus as a whole. If either were behind WannaCry, the attacks likely would have been more targeted, had more of an impact, would have been persistent, would have been more sophisticated, and would have garnered significantly greater profits.” The EternalBlue exploit was too valuable to waste “on a prolific and unprofitable campaign” like the May 12 WannaCry attack. By contrast, Bluenoroff “prefers to silently integrate into processes, extort them, and invisibly disappear after stealing massive fiscal gains.” [22] Bogdan Botezatu of Bitdefender, agrees. “The attack wasn’t targeted and there was no clear gain for them. It’s doubtful they would use such a powerful exploit for anything else but espionage.” [23]
WannaCry included a “kill switch,” apparently intended as a poorly thought out anti-VM feature. “For the life of me,” comments Peter Stephenson, “I can’t see why they might think that would work.” [24] When the software executes it first attempts to connect to a hostname that was unregistered. The malware would proceed to run if the domain was not valid. A cybersecurity researcher managed to disable WannaCry by registering the domain through NameCheap.com, shutting down with ease the ability of WannaCry to infect any further computers. [25]
Once WannaCry infected a computer, it demanded a ransom of $300 in bitcoin to release the files it had encrypted. After three days, the price doubled. The whole point of WannaCry was to generate income, and it is here where the code was most inept.
Ideally, ransomware like WannaCry would use a new account number for each infected computer, to better ensure anonymity. Instead, WannaCry hard-coded just three account numbers, which basically informed authorities what accounts to monitor. [26] It is an astonishing botch.
Incredibly, WannaCry lacked the capability of automatically identifying which victims paid the ransom. That meant that determining the source of each payment required manual effort, a daunting task given the number of infected computers. [27] Inevitably, decryption keys were not sent to paying victims and once the word got out, there was no motivation for anyone else to pay.
In James Scott’s assessment, “The WannaCry attack attracted very high publicity and very high law-enforcement visibility while inflicting arguably the least amount of damage a similar campaign that size could cause and garnering profits lower than even the most rudimentary script kiddie attacks.” Scott was incredulous over claims that WannaCry was a Lazarus operation. “There is no logical rationale defending the theory that the methodical [Lazarus], known for targeted attacks with tailored software, would suddenly launch a global campaign dependent on barely functional ransomware.” [28]
One would never know it from news reports, but cybersecurity attribution is rarely absolute. Hal Berghel, of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Nevada, comments on the “absence of detailed strategies to provide justifiable, evidence-based cyberattribution. There’s a reason for that: there is none. The most we have is informed opinion.” The certainty with which government officials and media assign blame in high-profile cyberattacks to perceived enemies should at least raise questions. “So whenever a politician, pundit, or executive tries to attribute something to one group or another, our first inclination should always be to look for signs of attribution bias, cognitive bias, cultural bias, cognitive dissonance, and so forth. Our first principle should be cui bono: What agendas are hidden? Whose interests are being represented or defended? What’s the motivation behind the statement? Where are the incentives behind the leak or reportage? How many of the claims have been substantiated by independent investigators?” [29]
IT security specialist Graham Cluley raises an important question. “I think in the current hostile climate between USA and North Korea it’s not unhelpful to retain some skepticism about why this claim might have been made, and what may have motivated the claim to be made at the present time.” [30]
To all appearances, WannaCry was the work of amateurish developers who got hold of NSA software that allowed the malware to spread like wildfire, but their own code was so poorly written that it failed to monetize the effort to any meaningful degree.
WannaCry has its uses, though. The Trump administration’s public attribution is “more about the administration’s message that North Korea is a dangerous actor than it is about cybersecurity,” says Ross Rustici, head of Intelligence Research at Cybereason. “They’re trying to lay the groundwork for people to feel like North Korea is a threat to the homeland.” [31] It is part of a campaign by the administration to stampede the public into supporting harsh measures or possibly even military action against North Korea.
[1] Thomas P. Bossert, “It’s Official: North Korea is Behind WannaCry,” Wall Street Journal,” December 19, 2017.
[2] “Press Briefing on the Attribution of the WannaCry Malware Attack to North Korea,” Whitehouse.gov, December 19, 2017.
[3] “WannaCry and Lazarus Group – the Missing Link?” SecureList, May 15, 2017.
[4] James Scott, “There’s Proof That North Korea Launched the WannaCry Attack? Not So Fast! – A Warning Against Premature, Inconclusive, and Distracting Attribution,” Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, May 23, 2017.
[5] Eduard Kovacs, “Industry Reactions to U.S. Blaming North Korea for WannaCry,” Security Week, December 22, 2017.
[6] “WannaCry: Ransomware Attacks Show Strong Links to Lazarus Group,” Symantec Official Blog, May 22, 2017.
[7] Gregory Elich, “Who Was Behind the Cyberattack on Sony?” Counterpunch, December 30, 2014.
[8] David Gilbert, Gareth Platt, “John McAfee: ‘I Know Who Hacked Sony Pictures – and it Wasn’t North Korea,” International Business Times, January 19, 2015.
[9] Amanda Rousseau, “WCry/WanaCry Ransomware Technical Analysis,” Endgame, May 14, 2017.
[10] Peter Stephenson, “WannaCry Attribution: I’m Not Convinced Kim Dunnit, but a Russian…”, SC Media, May 21, 2017.
[11] Digital Shadows Analyst Team, “WannaCry: An Analysis of Competing Hypotheses,” Digital Shadows, May 18, 2017.
[12] Patrick Howell O’Neill, “Researchers: WannaCry Ransomware Shares Code with North Korean Malware,” Cyberscoop, May 15, 2017.
[13] Alan Woodward, “Attribution is Difficult – Consider All the Evidence,” Cyber Matters, May 24, 2017.
[14] Thomas P. Bossert, “It’s Official: North Korea is Behind WannaCry,” Wall Street Journal,” December 19, 2017.
[15] Luke Somerville, Abel Toro, “WannaCry Post-Outbreak Analysis,” Forcepoint, May 16, 2017.
Sarah Maloney, “WannaCry / WCry /WannaCrypt Attack Profile,” Cybereason, May 16, 2017.
Rohit Langde, “WannaCry Ransomware: A Detailed Analysis of the Attack,” Techspective, September 26, 2017.
[16] Eduard Kovacs, “WannaCry Does Not Fit North Korea’s Style, Interests: Experts,” Security Week, May 19, 2017.
[17] “A Technical Analysis of WannaCry Ransomware,” LogRhythm, May 16, 2017.
[18] Digital Shadows Analyst Team, “WannaCry: An Analysis of Competing Hypotheses,” Digital Shadows, May 18, 2017.
[19] Jon Condra, John Costello, Sherman Chu, “Linguistic Analysis of WannaCry Ransomware Messages Suggests Chinese-Speaking Authors,” Flashpoint, May 25, 2017.
[20] Alan Woodward, “Attribution is Difficult – Consider All the Evidence,” Cyber Matters, May 24, 2017.
[21] Erika Noerenberg, Andrew Costis, Nathanial Quist, “A Technical Analysis of WannaCry Ransomware,” LogRhythm, May 16, 2017.
[22] James Scott, “There’s Proof That North Korea Launched the WannaCry Attack? Not So Fast! – A Warning Against Premature, Inconclusive, and Distracting Attribution,” Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, May 23, 2017.
[23] Eduard Kovacs, “WannaCry Does Not Fit North Korea’s Style, Interests: Experts,” Security Week, May 19, 2017.
[24] Peter Stephenson, “WannaCry Attribution: I’m Not Convinced Kim Dunnit, but a Russian…”, SC Media, May 21, 2017.
[25] Rohit Langde, “WannaCry Ransomware: A Detailed Analysis of the Attack,” Techspective, September 26, 2017.
[26] Jesse Dunietz, “The Imperfect Crime: How the WannaCry Hackers Could Get Nabbed,” Scientific American, August 16, 2017.
[27] Andy Greenberg, “The WannaCry Ransomware Hackers Made Some Major Mistakes,” Wired, May 15, 2017.
[28] James Scott, “WannaCry Ransomware & the Perils of Shoddy Attribution: It’s the Russians! No Wait, it’s the North Koreans!” Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, May 18, 2017.
[29] Hal Berghel, “On the Problem of (Cyber) Attribution,” Computer — IEEE Computer Society, March 2017.
[30] Scott Carey, “Should We Believe the White House When it Says North Korea is Behind WannaCry?” Computer World, December 20, 2017.
[31] John P. Mello Jr., “US Fingers North Korea for WannaCry Epidemic,” Tech News World, December 20, 2017.
Gregory Elich is on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute and the Advisory Board of the Korea Policy Institute. He is a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for Voice of the People, and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period, published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. His website is https://gregoryelich.org Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich
January 3, 2018 Posted by aletho | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | North Korea, United States, Wall Street Journal, WannaCry | Leave a comment
Flashback: Key witness disputes Hejazi account of Neda death
PressTV | July 29, 2009
More than a month after Neda Aqa-Soltan was killed in the post-election frenzy in Iran, a key witness to the incident moves to set the record straight.
Neda, 26, was shot dead on June 20 in an alley away from the scene of clashes between security forces and demonstrators in Tehran.
She immediately became an international icon after graphic videos of her bleeding to death in a matter of seconds, grabbed the attention of world media outlets.
Hamid Panahi, Neda’s friend and music teacher who was by her side in her final moments, dismissed the slew of eyewitness accounts of the sad incident — particularly the one given by Arash Hejazi.
Arash Hejazi, an Iranian physician currently studying in England, told the BBC that he had witnessed a member of the Basij shooting Neda.
His comments were a contributing factor in the Western-led media campaign against the Ahmadinejad government.
Panahi said contrary to Hejazi’s account of the incident, ‘there were no security forces of Basij members nearby’.
“In his interviews with foreign media outlets, Mr. Hejazi said that the culprit behind Neda’s death was arrested on the spot. I saw nothing of the sort. There were only about a dozen people present at the scene. No one was arrested,” he said.
To prove his point, Panahi said that new revelations have found that Neda was in fact shot not in the chest, but in the back.
Panahi is not the first to dismiss Hejazi’s account of Neda’s death. Earlier in June, the man who drove Neda to hospital had also said that there were no Basij members around at the time.
Iranian security forces have dismissed the reports out of hand, asserting that they did not open fire on protestors during the sporadic unrest.
While Media outlets in the West blame Neda’s death on Iranian security forces, new revelations show that she was murdered by a small caliber pistol– a weapon that is not used by Iranian security forces.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has asked Judiciary chief Ayatollah Hashemi-Shahroudi to conduct a through investigation into the incident.
January 2, 2018 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | BBC, Iran | Leave a comment
Kosherising the 9/11 Truth Movement
By Gilad Atzmon | January 2, 2018
I have been correctly accused of remaining silent about 9/11. Although I frequently talk to 9/11 truth groups about various related topics such as Israel, Zionism and Jewish ID politics, I do not contribute to the discourse involving controlled demolitions and airplanes flying into buildings. Engineering, construction and flying are not within my field of research. Though I am aware of many of the details to do with the 9/11 truth movement, I can’t make any original scholarly contributions in this arena.
However, there are a few areas of my study that I think are important in relation to the 9/11 truth movement:
1. The Mossad’s motto is ‘by way of deception’ and false flag operations are deeply rooted in the Mossad’s modus operandi.
2. The prime beneficiary of 9/11 has been Israel. It was Zio-cons who pushed for the so-called ‘war against terror.’ In the name of democracy and Coca Cola the English speaking empire has been fighting Zionist conflicts for almost two decades.
3. Most important, be aware that controlling the opposition is at the core of Zionist survival strategy.
The last point is one of the most important conclusions I draw in my latest book, Being in Time – a Post Political Manifesto.
When self-identified Jews notice that something about their culture, ideology or politics has become a problematic topic, some Jews often form Jewish satellite dissent. Once the Israeli Palestinian conflict evolved into a ‘Jewish problem,’ some ethically motivated Jews formed JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace), Mondoweiss and other pro-Palestinian Jewish bodies. Within a short time these groups gained complete hegemony within the Palestinian Solidarity Movement. As soon as it became clear that the Neocon school is primarily an extended Zionist gathering and that Neocon wars are, in practice, Ziocon global conflicts, the ‘Neocon debate’ was reduced to an internal Jewish quarrel between rabid Zion-con Sam Harris and Anti-con Noam Chomsky.
But what about 9/11?
In my talks and writings I sarcastically suggest to my listeners that if Global Warming were to mature into a ‘Jewish problem,’ in a few hours we would see the formation of the newly ecologically aware ‘Jews Against Global Warming’ (JAGW I guess). It would probably take another week before the new Jewish body would take over the Anti Global Warming Movement and start to expel the so-called ‘anti-Semites.’ This scheme applies to 9/11 truth. As soon as some noticed that the truth movement had become an emerging ‘Jewish problem,’ we could see a growing number of infiltrators attempting to steer the movement away from Israel. This transition within the truth movement has made the 9/11 truth movement of great interest to me.
Ludwig Watzal, Elias Davidsson and the Kosher Narrative
Following the recent duplicitous slander campaign against my work in Germany run by Elias Davidsson and Ludwig Watzal, I stumbled upon their comical 9/11 spin. Countercurrents’ Are 9/11 Truthers Anti-Semites? An Interview With Elias Davidsson by Ludwig Watzal is a case study of an open, non–apologetic attempt to sabotage a movement.
Watzal writes, “Elias Davidsson is one of these ‘truthers’ who challenges the official narrative on 9/11. He is also concerned about the claim made by some ‘truthers’ that Israel was behind the attacks…”
Then we learn that Elias Davidsson is upset by Jew haters who keep referring to the ‘dancing Israelis’ and “the canard that 4,000 Jews, who, forewarned, did not go to work to the World Trade Center on 9/11.” Larry Silverstein is also vindicated by our 9/11 ‘truther’ because “he did not make any effort to cover his alleged tracks. He leased the WTC just six weeks before 9/11, announced this lease to the world, insured it against terrorism for a whopping $3.2 billion and ‘admitted’ in a documentary film to have given on 9/11 the authorization to ‘pull’ WTC 7.” According to our ‘kosher detective’ Davidsson, all this is evidence that Silverstein is innocent. Why? Because “we have here all the requisite elements: A greedy Jew, proximity to the crime, motive. It is precisely the high visibility of Larry Silverstein as an ideal villain that makes me (Davidsson) hesitate to implicate him in the crime. His alleged complicity is simply too obvious.”
Silverstein may well be innocent, although proximity to the crime, having a motive and high visibility are not elements of ‘vindication.’ On the contrary, they justify intense scrutiny of Silverstein’s actions.
If Davidsson and Watzal had spent some time reading yours truly instead of fabricating statements and attributing them to me, they would know that I explain this. I contend that self identified Jews hardly conspire, they prefer to act in the open. Whether it is AIPAC, J-STRET, CFI, The CRIFF, Soros, Kushner or Israeli war crimes in Gaza, Jewish action is not disguised. Jewish power, on the other hand, is the power to suppress discussion of Jewish power. Silverstein and Davidsson both provide evidence of my hypothesis. Silverstein acted in the open and Davidsson is obviously committed to suppressing discussion of Israel and Silverstein within the truth movement.
But “what might be the motives for linking Israel to 9/11?” Watzal wonders.
Davidsson answers, “who are better placed as bogeymen than Jews or Israel? The Nazis used this method with great success.”
Apparently Davidsson’s role in the truth movement is identical to JVP’s role in the Palestinian solidarity movement. The self appointed commissars are there to label as ‘Nazis’ those who do not adhere to the ‘correct’ narrative.
At this stage, I am not in any position to assess the role Israel might have played in 9/11. But I can easily evaluate Davidsson and Watzal’s kosher impetus. Both publicly attempt to steer the inquiry away from Israel or anything remotely Zionist.
Finally, Watzal asks Davidsson who did 9/11, to which Davidsson answers “I consider it beyond dispute that the US military planned and executed the mass-murder of 9/11 on behalf of the US elite (which, evidently, includes also persons of Jewish descent).”
Watzal and Davidsson inveigle to move the 9/11 movement to the realm of ‘beyond dispute,’ a territory in which Israel is clean and Silverstein has become a victim. In Davidsson’s ‘beyond dispute’ land, once again, it is Goyim who are killing Goyim. Is it possible that both Davidsson and Watzal are too afraid of the 9/11 truth movement retaining its freedom to explore alternative narratives?
In his invaluable book Heidegger and the Jews, the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard suggested that history claims to tell us what really happened, but in practice, it acts to conceal our collective shame. In the above article I come short of labelling Watzal and Davidsson as Israeli agents or controlled opposition, but it is clear ‘beyond dispute’ who and what the two are working hard to shove under the carpet.
January 2, 2018 Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, False Flag Terrorism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | 9/11, Israel, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment
John Bolton: “Our Goal Should Be Regime Change In Iran”
By Hunter Wallace | Occidental Dissent | January 1, 2018
If you wondered what happened to John Bolton, the neocon throwback who advocated the disastrous Iraq War, he is back to educate normies on how tell deal with Iran.
Follow the money to President Donald Trump:
“Indeed, the influence of these key donors—Sheldon Adelson, Bernard Marcus, and Paul Singer—over U.S. foreign policy, particularly with regards to Iran, doesn’t stop at the White House, where combined they contributed over $40 million to various pro-Trump political groups and causes.
Those three donors also contributed $65 million at the congressional level. That represents nearly half of the individual contributions made to the Senate Leadership Fund (CLF) and Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), Super PACs dedicated to maintaining Republican majorities in the House and Senate. Those contributions provide a considerable incentive for Hill Republicans to stake out a hawkish position on the JCPOA. …”
The GOP has a lot of shekels riding on this!
Bibi Netanyahu wants you to know it has nothing to do with Israel even though it came the day after the announcement of the Trump administration and Israel’s joint plan to counter Iran.
It is all just one big (((coincidence))).
January 2, 2018 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video, Wars for Israel | Iran, Israel, John Bolton, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment
WSJ Said It 6 Months ago: CIA Working to Turn up Heat on Iran
Al-Manar | January 2, 2018
American daily Wall Street Journal had said it clearly six months ago: The Central Intelligence Agency has established an organization in Iran aimed at spying on the Islamic Republic.
“The Central Intelligence Agency has established an organization focused exclusively on gathering and analyzing intelligence about Iran, reflecting the Trump administration’s decision to make that country a higher priority target for American spies,” the WSJ reported last June, citing US officials.
The report said that the mission center “will bring together analysts, operations personnel and specialists from across the CIA to bring to bear the range of the agency’s capabilities, including covert action.”
The CIA did not announce the Iran Mission Center at that time, but it likened it to the Korea Mission Center that the CIA announced earlier in May to address North Korea’s efforts to develop long-range nuclear missiles.
Talking more about the move, the report described CIA Director Mike Pompeo as a longtime Iran hawk, citing his first public remarks since taking the helm at the spy agency, when he warned that Iran was “on the march.”
“Whether its enormous increased capacity to deliver missile systems into Israel from Hezbollah, their increased strength in and around Mosul with the Shia militias, the work that they’ve done to support the Houthis to fire missiles against the Saudis—the list of Iranian transgressions has increased dramatically since the date that the JCPOA was signed,” the WSJ quoted Pompeo as saying then, referring the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 agreement that Iran struck with the US and other world powers to limit its nuclear program.
“We’re actively engaged in a lot of work to assist the president, making sure he has an understanding of where the Iranians are complying and where they might not be,” the report quoted Pompeo as saying at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington in April.
The report also quoted Mark Lowenthal, a former senior CIA official as saying that the center in Iran was an effort by the agency to bring all its experts together in one place, from the spies who gather information to the analysts who make sense of it.
“We know that combining [intelligence] collectors and analysts together you end up with better analysis and better operations,” Lowenthal said, noting that the center model has been used successfully in other areas.
January 2, 2018 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CIA, Iran, United States | Leave a comment
The Still-Missing Evidence of Russia-gate
By Dennis J. Bernstein | Consortium News | January 1, 2018
A changing-places moment brought about by Russia-gate is that liberals who are usually more skeptical of U.S. intelligence agencies, especially their evidence-free claims, now question the patriotism of Americans who insist that the intelligence community supply proof to support the dangerous claims about Russian ‘hacking” of Democratic emails especially when some veteran U.S. government experts say the data would be easily available if the Russians indeed were guilty.
One of those experts is William Binney, a former high-level National Security Agency intelligence official who, after his 2001 retirement, blew the whistle on NSA extraordinary breadth of NSA surveillance programs. His outspoken criticism of the NSA during the George W. Bush administration made him the subject of FBI investigations that included a raid on his home in 2007.
Even before Edward Snowden’s NSA whistleblowing, Binney publicly revealed that NSA had access to telecommunications companies’ domestic and international billing records, and that since 9/11 the agency has intercepted some 15 trillion to 20 trillion communications. Snowden has said: “I have tremendous respect for Binney, who did everything he could according to the rules.”
I spoke to Binney on Dec. 28 about Russia-gate and a host of topics having to do with spying and America’s expanding national security state.
Dennis Bernstein: I would like you to begin by telling us a little about your background at the NSA and how you got there.
William Binney: I was in the United States Army from 1965 to 1969. They put me in the Army Security Agency, an affiliate of the NSA. They liked the work I was doing and they put me on a priority hire in 1970. I was in the NSA for 32 years, mostly working against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. I was solving what were called “wizard puzzles,” and the NSA was sometimes referred to as the “Puzzle Palace.” I had to solve code systems and work on cyber systems and data systems to be able to predict in advance the “intentions and capabilities of adversaries or potential adversaries.”
Bernstein: At a certain point you ran amiss of your supervisors. What did you come to understand and try to tell people that got you in dutch with your higher-ups?
Binney: By 1998-1999, the “digital issue” was basically solved. This created a problem for the upper ranks because at the time they were lobbying Congress for $3.8 billion to continue working on what we had already accomplished. That lobby was started in 1989 for a separate program called Trailblazer, which failed miserably in 2005-2006. We had to brief Congress on how we were progressing and my information ran contrary to the efforts downtown to secure more funding. And so this caused a problem internally.
We learned from some of our staff members in Congress that several of the corporations that were getting contracts from the NSA were downtown lobbying against our program in Congress. This is the military industrial complex in action. That lobby was supported by the NSA management because they just wanted more money to build a bigger empire.
But Dick Cheney, who was behind all of this, wanted it because he grew up under Nixon, who always wanted to know what his political enemies were thinking and doing. This kind of approach of bulk acquisition of everything was possible after you removed certain segments of our software and they used it against the entire digital world. Cheney wanted to know who his political enemies were and get updates about them at any time.
Bernstein: Your expertise was in the Soviet Union and so you must know a lot about bugging. Do you believe that Russia hacked and undermined our last election? Can Trump thank Russia for the result?
Binney: We at Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) published an article on this in July. First of all, if any of the data went anywhere across the fiber optic world, the NSA would know. Just inside the United States, the NSA has over a hundred tap points on the fiber lines, taking in everything. Mark Klein exposed some of this at the AT&T facility in San Francisco.
This is not for foreigners, by the way, this is for targeting US citizens. If they wanted only foreigners, all they would have to do was look at the transatlantic cables where they surface on the coast of the United States. But they are not there, they are distributed among the US population.
Bernstein: So if, in fact, the Russians were tapping into DNC headquarters, the NSA would absolutely know about it.
Binney: Yes, and they would also have trace routes on where they went specifically, in Russia or anywhere else. If you remember, about three or four years ago, the Chinese hacked into somewhere in the United States and our government came out and confirmed that it was the Chinese who did it, and it came from a specific military facility in Shanghai. The NSA had these trace route programs embedded by the hundreds across the US and all around the world.
The other data that came out from Guccifer 2.0, a download from the DNC, has been a charade. It was a download and not a transfer across the Web. The Web won’t manage such a high speed. It could not have gotten across the Atlantic at that high speed. You would have to have high capacity lines dedicated to that in order to do it. They have been playing games with us. There is no factual evidence to back up any charge of hacking here.
Bernstein: So was this a leak by somebody at Democratic headquarters?
Binney: We don’t know that for sure, either. All we know was that it was a local download. We can likely attribute it to a USB device that was physically passed along.
Bernstein: Let me come at this from the other side. Has the United States ever tried to hack into and undermine Russian operations in this way?
Binney: Oh, sure. We do it as much as anybody else. In the Ukraine, for example, we sponsored regime change. When someone who was pro-Soviet was elected president, we orchestrated a coup to put our man in power.
Then we invited the Ukraine into NATO. One of the agreements we made with the Russians when the Soviet Union fell apart was that the Ukraine would give them their nuclear weapons to manage and that we would not move NATO further east toward Russia. I think they made a big mistake when they asked Ukraine to join NATO. They should have asked Russia to join as well, making it all-inclusive. If you treat people as adversaries, they are going to act that way.
Bernstein: Did the US meddle in the Russian elections that brought Yeltsin to power?
Binney: I believe they did. We try to leverage our power and influence elections around the world.
Bernstein: What has your group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, been up to, and what has been the US government’s response?
Binney: We have been discussing privacy and security with the European Union and with a number of European parliaments. Recently the Austrian supreme court ruled that the entire bulk acquisition system was unconstitutional. Everyone but the conservatives in the Austrian parliament voted that bill down, making Austria the first country there to do the right thing.
Bernstein: Is it your goal to defend people’s privacy and their right to communicate privately?
Binney: Yes, to defend privacy but also to defend the Constitution. Right now, our government is violating the first, fourth and fifth amendments in various ways. Mueller did it, Comey did it, they were all involved in violating the Constitution.
Back in the 1990’s, the idea was to make our analysts effective so that they could see threats coming before they happened and alert people to take action so that lives would be saved. What happens now is that people go out and kill someone and then the NSA and the FBI go on a forensics mission. Intelligence is supposed to tell you in advance when a crime is coming so that you can do something to avert it. They have lost that perspective.
Bernstein: They now have access to every single one of our electronic conversations, is that right? The human mind has a hard time imagining how you could contain, move and study all that information.
Binney: Basically, it is achievable because most of the processing is done by machine so it doesn’t cost human energy.
Bernstein: There seems to be a new McCarthyite operation around the Russia-gate investigation. It appears that it is an attempt to justify the idea that Clinton lost because the Russians undermined the election.
Binney: I have seen no evidence at all from anybody, including the intelligence community. If you look at the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) report, they state on the first page that “We have high confidence that the Russians did this.” But when you get toward the end of the report, they basically confess that “our judgment does not imply that we have evidence to back it up.”
Bernstein: It was initially put out that seventeen intelligence agencies found compelling evidence that the Russians hacked into our election. You’re saying it was actually selected individuals from just three agencies. Is there anything to the revelations that FBI agents talked about taking action to prevent Trump from becoming president?
Binney: It certainly does seem that it is leaning that way, that it was all a frame-up. It is a sad time in our history, to see the government working against itself internally.
Bernstein: I take it you are not a big supporter of Trump.
Binney: Well, I voted for him. I couldn’t vote for a warmonger like Clinton. She wanted to see our planes shooting down Russian planes in Syria. She advocated for destabilizing Libya, for getting rid of Assad in Syria, she was a strong backer of the war in Iraq.
Bernstein: What concerns do you have regarding the Russia-gate investigation and the McCarthyite tactics that are being employed?
Binney: Ultimately, my main concern is that it could lead to actual war with Russia. We should definitely not be going down that path. We need to get out of all these wars. I am also concerned about what we are doing to our own democracy. We are trampling the fundamental principles contained in the Constitution. The only way to reverse all this is to start indicting people who are participating in and managing these activities that are clearly unconstitutional.
Dennis J Bernstein is a host of “Flashpoints” on the Pacifica radio network and the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom. You can access the audio archives at www.flashpoints.net.
January 1, 2018 Posted by aletho | Deception, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | NSA, United States | Leave a comment
President Trump’s Jerusalem Decision: the End of Hegemony?
By James Petras • Unz Review • January 1, 2018
Introduction
The Trump regime proclaimed that the vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations regarding the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was a strategic US decision.
Both President Trump and his bombastic UN Ambassador Nikki Haley threatened that all decisions and agreements regarding alliances, loans, aid and diplomatic relations were at stake.
Moreover, the Trump regime clearly defined the style and substance of US imperial dictates: All UN member nations (large and small) must grovel in the most abject manner to his orders. Ambassador Haley demanded that each nation on earth accept Trump’s and the racist-Zionist Netanyahu’s declaration that the ancient city of Jerusalem is the eternal, undivided and ethnically managed capital of the Jews. Trump’s message was loud and clear – he was the great ‘decider’ and the UN votes would identify America’s true friends and enemies. “We are making a list… and there will be consequences…”
Clearly Trump’s boast of US power and Haley’s assumption that her terrifying threats would ensure that Washington had a majority vote in the ‘gifting’ of Jerusalem to Zio-fascism. They believed that US dominance and global hegemony was absolute and unassailable. The vote proved something else, something very new was happening.
The US suffered an overwhelming and humiliating defeat, one that kept Ambassador Haley’s dexterous fingers busy ‘taking notes’: 128 nations demanded that the Trump regime withdraw its declaration that Jerusalem was Israel’s undivided capital for Jews. Only 9 micro-nations (some mere postage stamps and a few death-squad banana-stans) voted with the Trump-Haley decision, 35 mendicant-states put their heads down and abstained while 21 timorous ambassadors chose to hide their shamelessness in the toilet stalls rather than show up for this important vote.
Political Context
First and foremost it is important to discuss the steps leading up to the US suffering such a crushing debacle. In other words, who was responsible for leading the Trump Administration by the nose down the blind alley of submission to the dictates of Zio-fascism.
The leader and driving force behind the UN disaster was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whose quest to seize Jerusalem and convert it into the ‘eternal’ capital of the Jews was his top priority. For decades the entire world has rejected Israel’s seizure of Jerusalem and its conversion into an ethnically cleansed capital for the ‘Jewish’ state. The UN and international jurists denounced Israel’s colonial conquest and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Netanyahu took charge with the election of Donald Trump as President. Operation Jerusalem was his first order to Puppet Donald. A number of Israel-First multi-billionaires, who financed Trump’s electoral campaign, demanded an immediate pay-off from their puppet: The Administration’s unconditional support for Netanyahu’s agenda. Despite protests from the rest of the world, especially the US closest European allies, Trump plunged the nation right into the Zionist soup: a Jewish Jerusalem; the systematic eviction of all Arabs, Christian, Muslim and secular, and the eventual annexation of all of Palestine; as well as an increasing military confrontation with Iran.
Real estate speculator, Jared Kushner, Trump’s pampered son-in- law, and a complete Netanyahu flunky, became the senior advisor for the Middle East. Kushner pressured Trump’s National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn to intervene with Russia on behalf of Israel’s take-over of Jerusalem. Flynn was subsequently prosecuted for discussing global US Russian relations and the ‘good soldier’ is falling on his sword on behalf of the Zionists. Not surprising, the Congressional Democrats, the FBI and the Special Prosecutor found it easier to prosecute Flynn for his discussion regarding de-escalating the tense US-Russian relations provoked by the Obama administration than his discussions with the Kremlin in support of Israel’s seizure of Jerusalem!
Netanyahu’s operational weapons in manipulating US policy involved Jared Kushner, the billionaire Israel-First donors, the AIPAC and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. Tel Aviv succeeded in securing Trump’s commitment to the Israeli agenda, despite opposition from the entire UN National Security Council and the overwhelming majority of the General Assembly. In the style of a typical authoritarian, US President Trump grovels at the feet of his ‘superior’, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while tearing at the throats of his ‘inferiors’, the 193 member nations of the UN General Assembly.
Netanyahu’s vitriolic bar room threats against the entire membership of the UN prior to the vote ensured the repudiation of all Security Council representatives with the exception of his South Carolina puppet, Ambassador Nikki Haley. Trump and Haley backed the blustering Netanyahu by issuing gangland threats to all UN representatives who dare to oppose Washington’s dictates.
In this way, Prime Minister Netanyahu secured the greatest diplomatic and political success of his career – the total submission of the US to his agenda, at the risk of a major humiliation in the UN. This, in effect, formalized Israeli hegemony over Washington, for the world to see.
In contrast to Netanyahu’s beaming success, the US suffered a historic diplomatic defeat: Fourteen times as many nations voted against the demands of the US President over– Netanyahu’s grab of Jerusalem.
What makes the defeat even more striking is the fact that all major allies and most of the biggest aid recipients openly defied the US threats. Eight of the ten biggest US aid recipients voted against Trump–Netanyahu–Haley. This bizarre troika is now left with an enemy list circling the entire globe, and a few timorous allies in the South Pacific and among the death squads of Guatemala.
Trump’s total and puerile embrace of the raving Netanyahu has exposed and widened fissures in US global hegemony.
Apart from ‘capturing’ Netanyahu’s vote, the other pro Trump nations included a handful of insignificant Pacific islands (Marshall Islands, Palau, Micronesia), Togo, a corrupt African mini-state and two banana-sized ‘death squad democracies’, Honduras and Guatemala. The latter two regimes hold power via stolen elections backed by narco-thugs in the pay (dubbed ‘foreign aid’) of the US.
All of the leading Asian and Western European countries voted against Trump. They openly rejected the crude blackmail of the US-Israel duet. Subservient regimes in Eastern Europe, corrupt regimes in Latin America and some horrifically impoverished nations in Africa and Asia chose to abstain or excuse themselves to the bathrooms of Times Square. Narco-neo-liberal regimes in Mexico, Colombia, Paraguay, Panama and the Dominican Republic abstained. Even rightwing Eastern European regimes, which usually give unquestioned support to all US demands, like Romania, Bosnia, Poland and Latvia defied Nikki Haley’s ‘name taking’ by abstaining. The ‘no-shows’ (hiding in the toilets) included US puppets like Georgia, Samoa, St Kitts and Tonga.
An openly humiliated UN Ambassador Haley was left with the task of thanking the abstainers and ‘no-shows’ for their courage and preparing a few bags of goodies (matzos, Mogan David wine and discounts to the brothels of Tel Aviv) for the torturers of Honduras and half-drowned ‘leaders’ of Palau in gratitude for such loyalty.
Conclusion
Clearly Trump’s championing of a racist, colonialist, ethnic cleansing state like Israel is viewed as a strategic diplomatic disaster. The Manhattan egomaniac has tied the US fortunes to the whims of a pariah state led by a complete lunatic.
Trump’s decision to demonstrate total loyalty to his Zionist billionaire campaign ‘donor-owners’ and his Israel-First son-in-law in his first major foreign policy decision failed to impress any of the influential nations of the world – East or West. Indeed, it showed how fractured and dangerously dysfunctional the US Administration had become.
Most important, Trump’s proclamation of a unipolar world based on his notion of the US’s economic power has collapsed. Israel, despite Haley’s bluster and list-taking, has no legitimacy. It’s continued Mossad assassinations of leading Palestinians and others and the increasing IDF slaughter of the spontaneous Palestinian civilian resistance has failed to improve its international standing – except among Guatemalan torturers.
However, it is not clear that the US has lost its big power influence regarding other regional conflicts. The subsequent UN Security Council vote in favor of Washington’s demands for added sanctions against North Korea demonstrated Trump’s power to intimidate the oligarchs and leaders of China and Russia.
In other words, limits on US power still depend on the issues, the allies, the diplomatic appeals, the adversaries and the distribution of benefits and costs.
In the case of Jerusalem, Real Estate Mogul Trump’s bizarre decision to hand an entire city over to the Zionists alienated all Muslims and Christians the world over, as well as the secular Western liberal nations and emerging powers, like Russia and China. The US tied its prestige to the whims of a paranoid nation arrogantly flaunting its racist superiority complex, backed by groups of immensely wealthy overseas dual citizens.
Diplomatically, Israel’s vituperative responses to any legal criticism from world bodies undermines its chances of coalition building.
Finally, Washington’s support for Israel’s perpetual and overt violation of international law and its bombing of humanitarian missions makes Israel a very costly ally.
January 1, 2018 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel, Jerusalem, Palestine, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment
Botched reporting- A Reply to The NYT on “How Climate Change Deniers Rise to the Top in Google Searches”
By Leo Goldstein | Watts Up With That? | January 1, 2018
The New York Times remains a slave to climate alarmism even after its miserable failure in Paris on December 12, and continues to push the fossil fuels conspiracy theory. It’s regularly publishing fake news. A NYT piece that appeared on December 29, How Climate Change Deniers Rise to the Top in Google Searches, mentions me, my website DefyCCC, and WUWT, and I take this opportunity to reply. In November and December 2017, I experimented with distributing the climate realism message using advertising options on Google and some other platforms. I will report on the results of this experiment in a separate article. Apparently, some of my Google ads caught the attention of the NYT. On December 4th, a NYT reporter named Hiroko Tabuchi interviewed me for 45 minutes in preparing for the above NYT piece.
In the interview, I attempted to convince the reporter that the NYT got science wrong, that real scientists are against climate alarmism, and that other countries build coal power plants and more. The reporter was honest in telling me that the NYT piece would be about the ads, not about the climate debate (I hope NYT does not fire her for this act of honesty, unfit for its organizational culture), so I already knew what to expect. However, the piece weaves lies, half-truths, and trivial facts so seamlessly that it elevates fake news into an art form. I will comment only on some falsehoods related to me.
The only thing that surprised me in the NYT piece was how it used me to link Trump to Russia:
“Of course, people click,” said Mr. Goldstein, who said he had emigrated from Russia two decades ago and had worked in the software and power industries. “Google is the No. 1 advertising choice.”
The proliferation of climate disinformation, both online and off, has coincided with an effort to undermine measures to combat climate change. Republican leaders regularly question climate science and President Trump has called climate change a hoax.
I emigrated from the Soviet Union (not from Russia) before it dissolved in 1991, the dissolution that happened twenty-six years ago. I was born and grew up in the Ukraine, then a part of the Soviet Union. This information is present in the About page of my site. I did not tell the reporter that I “emigrated from Russia two decades ago.” Here, the New York Times has “slightly” changed times and names in order to evoke another conspiracy theory, one of a Trump-Russia collusion. The rest could have been expected. This is how the NYT linked me to the Koch brothers:
DefyCCC, the site that recently bought the “climate change” search term on Google, devotes an entire section of its site to content from WattsUpWithThat, a well-known climate denial site by the blogger Anthony Watts. Mr. Watts has received funding from the Heartland Institute, backed by the billionaire Koch brothers.
Beyond that, little is known about DefyCCC. …
The reporter ran this line (except for the last quoted sentence) by me in the interview. In fact, DefyCCC has no sections at all. It does have a menu, and links to my articles in WUWT are collected under top menu items In WattsUpWithThat and WUWT 2016. I explained that to the reporter. But the NYT still published this line, falsely insinuating that I am connected to the Koch brothers. The next sentence was supposed to cement this lie as truth:
“Beyond that, little is known about DefyCCC.”
This is also a typical line in the hatchet job pieces, used when it cannot find dirt on somebody. For the record, I also told her I have no information about other allegations in that paragraph. Further in the piece, the NYT made another wild insinuation about me:
He received help with his site but would not say who his backers were to protect their privacy.
In the interview, I said I have colleagues and refused to name them. Then, I told the reporter about the shooting of the UAH building as a reason to withdraw personal information. This topic was blacked out by the media, so the NYT didn’t mention it, but made up its own explanation. This is where fake news becomes an art form. In the sentence, the word help (from colleagues or coworkers) is followed by the word backers, subtly turning it into financial support. And then a quote, taken out of context, cements this impression.
Having written about my imaginary backers, the NYT failed to disclose its own. Its largest shareholder is Mexican multi-billionaire Carlos Slim, who was the world’s richest man a few years ago. Mr. Slim has significant investments in oil and natural gas in Latin America, which compete against U.S. oil, gas, and coal industries. The NYT’s attempts to damage the U.S. fossil fuels industry and promote the financial interests of its largest shareholder.
I took record of the insults that the NYT hurled at me, but I will not dignify them with a response.
The NYT piece mentions WUWT and DefyCCC, but it links to neither of our sites. I understand that it doesn’t want to transfer “link equity” or encourage readers to visit them. But, when the NYT wrote about white supremacists, it linked to Stormfront with a perfect, link equity carrying link (3), although it didn’t have to, or could have used a nofollow tag that prevented transfer of link equity. When I checked in September 2017, I found that the top neo-nazi websites received most of their link equity from the leftstream media. Just a note.
I don’t want to finish this article on the NYT links to neo-nazi websites. Sorry, I mean, the links from the NYT site to neo-nazi sites. Reading the NYT is not only misinforming, but also morally degrading. The NYT published two pieces about UFOs in December 2017: 2 Navy Airmen and an Object That ‘Accelerated Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen’ (in the section Politics) and Dad Believed in U.F.O.s. Turns Out He Wasn’t Alone (in the section News Analysis). Seems to me that the NYT is looking for its niche among tabloids.
Notes
Carlos Slim owned ~17% of class A shares of the NYT until a few months ago. But Class A shares of the NYT elect only about one third of the board. Class B shares are thought to be held by the Ochs-Sulzberger family. Father and son Ochs-Sulzberger have been the NYT publishers since 1963, so the NYT was considered independent from external financial influences. But, in the precarious financial situation into which the NYT painted itself by serving as a propaganda accessory and by false reporting — money ends up mattering more than formal voting rights. Thus, Carlos Slim probably wields or wielded much more power in the editorial room of the NYT than previously thought. To his credit, he is not a liberal. Mr. Slim also owns substantial interest in the tobacco industry around the world, which makes the NYT a sister company of Big Tobacco.
Posts about the New York Times take a good part of the fakestream media category in DefyCCC. Besides printing fake news, it was caught doing near-Orwellian re-writing of its articles to toe the party line. I have even proposed a new logo and byline for it that better reflects its new nature. It can use them free of charge under a Creative Commons license, just like other content of my website.
Addendum by Anthony:
The way the NYT article is written, it implies that WUWT has an ad campaign running in Google Adwords to attract readers. It does not, and never has. We have no advertising budget. The article also implies that WUWT is funded by the Heartland Institute. It is not and never has been. Neither WUWT nor the owner Anthony receives any payroll or regular funding from Heartland. We rely entirely upon advertisements (managed by WordPress.com and a sharing agreement) and donations from readers. In the past, Heartland helped locate a donor for a project, and Anthony has been given a $1000 honorarium and travel expenses to speak at some Heartland conferences on climate change, just like any other speaker, including pro-warming/pro-climate change scientist, Dr. Scott Denning.
Tabuchi also insinuated that WUWT and/or me is funded by the Koch Brothers; this is a laughable falsehood. They have never sent me a dime, either directly or indirectly. They don’t even know who I am and I’ve never had any contact with them or their charitable organization; it’s just a weak conspiracy theory pushed by the weak-minded who would rather take talking points from others than do their own homework.
But, the writer, one unheard of Ms. HIROKO TABUCHI never bothered to ask any questions of me. So as a journalist, she fails miserably based by relying on and writing about her own assumptions.
Is this the best the New York Times can do? Apparently so.
January 1, 2018 Posted by aletho | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | New York Times, United States | Leave a comment
Washington DC’s role behind the scenes in Hollywood goes deeper than you think
On television, we found more than 1,100 titles received Pentagon backing – 900 of them since 2005, from ‘Flight 93’ to ‘Ice Road Truckers’ and ‘Army Wives’
Blooms Mag | December 31, 2017
The US government and Hollywood have always been close. Washington DC has long been a source of intriguing plots for filmmakers and LA has been a generous provider of glamour and glitz to the political class.
But just how dependent are these two centres of American influence? Scrutiny of previously hidden documents reveals that the answer is: very.
We can now show that the relationship between US national security and Hollywood is much deeper and more political than anyone has ever acknowledged.
It is a matter of public record that the Pentagon has had an entertainment liaison office since 1948. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) established a similar position in 1996. Although it was known that they sometimes request script changes in exchange for advice, permission to use locations, and equipment such as aircraft carriers, each appeared to have passive, and largely apolitical roles.
Files we obtained, mainly through the US Freedom of Information Act, show that between 1911 and 2017, more than 800 feature films received support from the US Government’s Department of Defence (DoD), a significantly higher figure than previous estimates indicate. These included blockbuster franchises such as Transformers, Iron Man, and The Terminator.
On television, we found over 1,100 titles received Pentagon backing – 900 of them since 2005, from Flight 93 to Ice Road Truckers to Army Wives.
When we include individual episodes for long running shows like 24, Homeland, and NCIS, as well as the influence of other major organisations like the FBI and White House, we can establish unequivocally for the first time that the national security state has supported thousands of hours of entertainment.
For its part, the CIA has assisted in 60 film and television shows since its formation in 1947. This is a much lower figure than the DoD’s but its role has nonetheless been significant.
The CIA put considerable effort into dissuading representations of its very existence throughout the 1940s and 1950s. This meant it was entirely absent from cinematic and televisual culture until a fleeting image of a partially obscured plaque in Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest in 1959, as historian Simon Willmetts revealed last year.
The CIA soon endured an erosion of public support, while Hollywood cast the agency as villain in paranoid pictures like Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View in the 1970s and into the 1980s.
When the CIA established an entertainment liaison office in 1996, it made up for lost time, most emphatically on the Al Pacino film The Recruit and the Osama bin Laden assassination movie Zero Dark Thirty. Leaked private memos published by our colleague Tricia Jenkins in 2016, and other memos published in 2013 by the mainstream media, indicate that each of these productions was heavily influenced by government officials. Both heightened or inflated real-world threats and dampened down government malfeasance.
One of the most surprising alterations, though, we found in an unpublished interview regarding the comedy Meet the Parents. The CIA admitted it had asked that Robert De Niro’s character not possess an intimidating array of agency torture manuals.
Nor should we see the clandestine services as simply passive, naive or ineffectual during the counterculture years or its aftermath. They were still able to derail a Marlon Brando picture about the Iran-Contra scandal (in which the US illegally sold arms to Iran) by establishing a front company run by Colonel Oliver North to outbid Brando for the rights, journalist Nicholas Shou recently claimed.
The (CIA) director’s cut
The national security state has a profound, sometimes petty, impact on what Hollywood conveys politically. On Hulk, the DoD requested “pretty radical” script alterations, according to script notes we obtained through Freedom of Information. These included disassociating the military from the gruesome laboratories that created “a monster” and changing the codename of the operation to capture the Hulk from “ranch hand” to “angry man”. Ranch Hand had been the name of a real chemical warfare programme during the Vietnam war.
In making the alien movie Contact, the Pentagon “negotiated civilianisation of almost all military parts”, according to the database we acquired. It removed a scene in the original script where the military worries that an alien civilisation will destroy Earth with a “doomsday machine”, a view dismissed by Jodie Foster’s character as “paranoia right out of the Cold War”.
The role of the national security state in shaping screen entertainment has been underestimated and its examination long concentrated in remarkably few hands. The trickle of recent books has pushed back but only fractionally and tentatively. An earlier breakthrough occurred at the turn of the century, when historians identified successful attempts in the 1950s by a senior individual at the Paramount film studio to promote narratives favourable to a CIA contact known only as “Owen”.
The new FOI documents give a much better sense of the sheer scale of state activities in the entertainment industry, which we present alongside dozens of fresh cases studies. But we still do not know the specific impact of the government on a substantial portion of films and shows. The American Navy’s Marine Corps alone admitted to us that there are 90 boxes of relevant material in its archive. The government has seemed especially careful to avoid writing down details of actual changes made to scripts in the 21st century.
State officials have described Washington DC and Hollywood as being “sprung from the same DNA” and the capital as being “Hollywood for ugly people”. That ugly DNA has embedded far and wide. It seems the two cities on opposite sides of the United States are closer than we ever thought.
January 1, 2018 Posted by aletho | Deception, Film Review, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | CIA, United States | Leave a comment
Flashback: Police, Basij ‘imposters’ arrested in Iran
Press TV | June 29, 2009
Iranian police officials have reportedly arrested the armed imposters who posed as security forces during post-election violence in the country.
Iran’s Basij commander, Hossein Taeb, said Monday that the imposters had worn police and Basij uniforms to infiltrate the rallies and create havoc.
Taeb added that the recent anti-government riots have killed eight members of the Basij and wounded 300 others.
Iranian security officials –and in particularly the Basij volunteer forces– have been accused of killing and injuring protestors who took to the streets to protest the outcome of the June 12 election — which saw incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad win by a landslide.
“Basij forces are not authorized to carry weapons,” said Taeb, asserting that armed groups are the main culprit behind the killings.
Tehran Police Chief Azizallah Rajabzadeh has also insisted that his department had no role in the shoot-out that has become the focus of most media outlets in the West.
“Policemen are not authorized to use weapons against people,” said Rajabzadeh. “They are trained to only use anti-riot tools to keep the people out of harms way,” said Rajabzadeh.
Last week saw some of the worst violence since the election after some ‘terrorist elements’ infiltrated the rallies on Saturday, according to Iranian officials.
The insurgents set fire to a mosque, two gas stations and a military post in Western Tehran, leaving scores of people dead and wounded.
Supporters of the defeated candidates have staged a torrent of rallies, which have provoked unprecedented mayhem in the country over the past nine days.
Mir-Hossein Mousavi election campaign officials, however, have insisted that the defeated candidate’s supporters are not within the rioters.
December 31, 2017 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | Iran | Leave a comment
2018 will see US fighting three and a half wars in Middle East
By M K Bhadrakumar | Indian Punchline | December 31, 2017
At a ‘press gaggle’ at the Pentagon on Friday, US Defence Secretary James Mattis revealed that there isn’t going to be any withdrawal from the Syrian conflict. The Trump administration, on the contrary, plans to expand the presence by deploying diplomats and contractors to the north of Syria. Mattis called this a shift “from what I would call an offensive, terrain-seizing approach to a stabilizing” one.
That is to say, he explained, while the diplomats would work toward the “initial restoration of services” and to manage and administer rebuilding cities, the Pentagon will “bring in contractors” for training people on how to clear IEDs” (improvised explosive devices), etc. and alongside there will be a continuing military component to the US presence that “would move our diplomats around, protect them.” Mattis insisted that there is a “demarcation line” separating the US military zone in north and northeastern Syria, which the “Russian regime” and Syrian government are well aware of and are tacitly respecting so far.
Evidently, the US will continue its alliance with the Syrian Kurdish militia (known as YPG) in northern Syria, including the supply of weapons. The US defense spending bill for 2018 has made provision for sending weapons worth $393 million to US partners in Syria. Overall, $500 million, which is an increase of $70 million over 2016) is the allocation for Syria under ‘Train and Equip’ requirements. The budget mentions the opposition forces supported as a part of the train and equip program in Syria as 25,000 strong. The figure will now go up to 30,000 in 2018. Besides, the US and British military are training several hundred militants to create a New Syrian Army to fight the Syrian government forces in the south. (According to Russian estimates, most of the recruits are from ISIS and al-Qaeda groups.)
To be sure, the US’ ‘regime change’ agenda in Syria is back on track. But the Syrian conflict is also transforming as another template of a broader regional confrontation with Iran (and Russia) in the Middle East. The petard of Iran is useful to encourage the Sunni Arab petrodollar states to bankroll the war and overall make the US military interventions in the Middle East to be “self-financing”. (Mattis said, “We’ve got a lot of money coming from international donors for this, including Syria.”)
Meanwhile, this also means that the wars in Syria and Yemen are going to get fused at the hips, as it were. While the Obama administration was inclined to acknowledge that Iran’s interference in the war in Yemen, if at all, has been very minimal, the Trump administration has swung to the other extreme and brands the war as quintessentially a manifestation of Iran’s expansionist policies in the region. This creates the raison d’etre for more direct US intervention in the war in Yemen.
That makes it two full-bodied wars. Then, there is half a war to be added, which is in the nature of the Trump administration’s agenda to generally push back at Iran anywhere and everywhere (eg., Iraq, Lebanon), and, if possible, to bring about a ‘regime change’ in Tehran. According to a report in the Jerusalem Post last week, the US and Israel have set up 4 working groups to advance their “joint work plan” against Iran. This decision has been taken apparently at a secret meeting at the White House in Washington two weeks ago and will be put into the pipeline in 2018.
These two and a half wars become three and a half wars if we are also to add the Afghan war, which is entering its 17th year in 2018. The US has upped the ante by seeking a military solution to the Afghan war, disregarding the saner advice that a political solution is the best way out. The big question is whether 2018 will witnesses a US-Pakistani showdown.
A report in the New York Times on Friday hinted at the Trump administration “strongly considering whether to withhold $255 million in aid that it had delayed sending to Islamabad… as a show of dissatisfaction with Pakistan’s broader intransigence toward confronting the terrorist networks that operate there.” Evidently, the US’ capacity to leverage Pakistani policies is touching rock bottom. The next step could be to deliver on the threat to punish Pakistan. If that happens, there will be hell to pay.
Indeed, in the above cauldron, one hasn’t included the succession in Saudi Arabia, which can likely happen during 2018; the growing instability in Egypt; the continuing anarchy in Libya; or the Saudi-Qatar rift and the consequent unraveling of the GCC. Who says the US is about to cut loose from the Middle East and escape to the ‘Indo-Pacific’? Do not overlook that an overarching priority of the US’ Middle East strategy is also to evict Russia from the region as it managed to do in the early 1970s so as to contain the bear in its lair in Eurasia.
December 31, 2017 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Afghanistan, Iran, Middle East, Pakistan, Syria, United States, Yemen, YPG | Leave a comment
NYT Trumpwashes 70 Years of US Crimes
By Adam Johnson | FAIR | December 30, 2017
Trumpwashing—defined as whitewashing, obscuring or rewriting the broader US record by presenting Donald Trump as an aberration (FAIR, 6/3/16)—was on full display Thursday in a nominally straight news report from the New York Times’ Mark Landler (12/28/17) on how Trump has reshaped US foreign policy. Buried in the otherwise banal analysis was this gem of US imperial agitprop:
Above all, Mr. Trump has transformed the world’s view of the United States from a reliable anchor of the liberal, rules-based international order into something more inward-looking and unpredictable. That is a seminal change from the role the country has played for 70 years, under presidents from both parties, and it has lasting implications for how other countries chart their futures.
There’s lots of ideology to unpack here, but let’s start with the empirically false assertion that the “world” viewed the United States as a “reliable anchor of the liberal, rules-based international order.” Poll (Guardian, 6/15/06) after poll (Pew, 3/14/07) after poll (PRI, 1/3/14) throughout the years has shown that much of the world views the United States as threat to peace, often taking the top spot as the single greatest threat. What evidence Landler has for the world viewing the US as a sort of good-natured global babysitter is unclear, as he cites nothing to support this hugely important claim (since if Trump’s cynical disregard for “human rights” is nothing new, then there’s no real story here). It’s just thrown out with the assumption the Times readership is sufficiently nationalistic and/or amnesiac to either not notice or not care. It’s designed to flatter, not to elucidate.
The US invasion of Iraq in defiance of international law
The second dubious assertion is the idea that the US is “viewed” as being (or, by implication, objectively is) concerned with “liberal, rules-based international order.” Perhaps Landler missed the part where the US runs offshore penal colonies for untried political prisoners, and a decade-long drone war that’s killed thousands—both entirely outside the scope of international law. Or the time the US invaded and destroyed Iraq without any international authorization, killing hundreds of thousands. Or perhaps he missed the part where the United States refuses to sign “liberal, rules-based international order” treaties such as the International Criminal Court or the ban on bombs and or a prohibition on nuclear weapons. Or the part where the US not only doesn’t recognize the International Criminal Court, but has a law on its books (dubbed “the Hague Invasion Act,” passed in 2002) that if an American is ever held by the ICC for committing war crimes, the US is obligated to literally invade the Hague and free them.
And this is just in the past 15 years. Landler, even more laughably, starts the clock in 1947, which would include dozens of non-“liberal,” non-“rules-based” coups, invasions, bombing campaigns, assassinations, extrajudicial murders and so forth. The number of actions carried out by the US not sanctioned by even the thinnest pretext of “international order” is too long to list.
What exactly is this “liberal, rules-based international order,” and when did “the world” view the United States as its most reliable anchor? Landler doesn’t say, he simply asserts this highly contestable and ideological claim, and moves on to pearl-clutch about Trump ruining the US’s hard-won moral authority. He has some 100 percent uncut pro-US ideology to push under the guise of criticizing Trump, and no amount of basic historical facts will get in his way.
December 31, 2017 Posted by aletho | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, New York Times, United States | Leave a comment
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