William Burns, ex-envoy to Russia who accused Putin of using judo-like tactics to ‘sow chaos’ in US, named as Biden’s CIA director
RT | January 11, 2021
[Proclaimed] President-elect Joe Biden has nominated career diplomat William Burns to serve as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, claiming that Americans will “sleep soundly” with Burns at the helm of the shadowy intel service.
Burns, who is currently president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an international affairs think tank based in Washington, DC, retired from the US Foreign Service in 2014 after a 33-year career in diplomacy. He served as deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration from 2011-2014, and as ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008. Before his assignment in Moscow, Burns was US envoy to Jordan from 1998 to 2001, and was appointed assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs from 2001 to 2005.
In a press release, Biden described Burns as a “exemplary diplomat with decades of experience on the world stage keeping our people and our country safe and secure.” The statement said that Burns understood the alleged threats facing the United States, whether they be “attacks emanating from Moscow, the challenge China poses,” or plots being hatched by terrorists and other non-state actors.
Like many other State Department veterans, Burns has repeatedly accused Moscow of interfering in the 2016 presidential elections.
In a 2017 op-ed published by the New York Times, the retired diplomat accused Russia of “aggressive” and “deeply troubling” election meddling. Burns predicted that Washington’s relationship with Moscow will remain competitive and “often adversarial” for the foreseeable future, claiming that Russian President Vladimir Putin is seeking greater influence in the world “at the expense of an American-led order.” He alleged that Russia is dreaming of a dominant position in global affairs unconstrained by “Western values and institutions.”
He called on the US to focus on the conflict in Ukraine, predicting that the country’s fate will determine the “future of Europe, and Russia, over the next generation.”
Tellingly, he also dismissed the “superficially appealing notions” like cooperation against Islamic terrorism. He claimed that Russia’s efforts to help the Syrian government defeat Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) has made the terrorist threat “far worse.”
His animosity towards Russia was again revealed in an interview with the Atlantic magazine in 2019. He told the outlet that Putin had been able to “sow chaos” in the United States by “acting like [a] good judo expert, which he is.” According to Burns, the Russian leader took advantage of a “stronger opponent” by leveraging the “polarization and dysfunction” in the US political system.
Burns even suggested that the now-debunked claims of “collusion” between Moscow and the Trump campaign in 2016 had merit, hinting that Special Counsel Robert Mueller could potentially uncover a larger conspiracy behind Putin’s alleged judo-like interference.
Mueller’s probe ultimately found no evidence of collusion, despite years of salacious media reports alleging overwhelming proof of a vast conspiracy between Trump and the Kremlin.
The diplomat appears to have a more reconciliatory approach towards China. Although he has identified Beijing as a long-term competitor with Washington, he has argued that China was more focused on “adapting” to the US-led world order, rather than “undermining it,” which he accused Russia of doing. However, he expressed support for at least some aspects of the Trump administration’s trade war with China, describing the hardline economic policy as “overdue.”
Data giant Palantir’s murky track record raises alarming questions about secret, potentially illegal £23 million NHS deal
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | December 23, 2020
Palantir has won a huge contract to continue its work on the NHS Covid-19 Data Store. But the British public will have no way of knowing how the private information the company has been granted access to will be used.
The potentially illegal two-year deal, which began on December 12, was awarded under the Crown Commercial Services G-Cloud 11 Framework, a ‘streamlined’ – i.e. much-accelerated – system typically used for minor contracts, which doesn’t require a tender to be published. Under the terms of the agreement, the store will rely on Palantir’s Foundry data until at least December 2022.
The store was established in March to manage Covid-19 data and inform the government’s response to the virus. Palantir was one of several tech firms hired for the project, for the princely sum of £1, and ever since has been granted access to sensitive data such as patients’ ages, addresses, health conditions, treatments and whether they smoke or drink, among other private information.
Such information is clearly a highly valuable commodity, exclusive oversight of which is fraught with opportunity for abuse, but Whitehall insists any personally-identifying details are aggregated or anonymized prior to being shared with Palantir et al.
Despite these reassurances, the deal did not go unchallenged – not least because the contracts underpinning the deal weren’t published until June, mere hours before a legal action brought by political campaigning website openDemocracy and law firm Foxglove to secure their release was due to commence.
A very secret weapon
An even cursory review of Palantir’s operations starkly underlines why so many should be concerned about its involvement with the NHS, and its access to such intimate patient particulars.
Co-founder Peter Thiel’s inspiration for the company was a desire to repurpose the fraud recognition systems of PayPal – which he also co-founded – for defense and security applications. Most established investors weren’t interested in his pitch, but it caught the attention of In-Q-Tel, the little-known venture capital wing of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which gifted the start-up US$2 million in 2004.
A decade later, Palantir was valued in the billions and pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars annually, primarily from US government agencies, including the CIA, Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Special Operations Command.
The company’s ‘Gotham’ platform pools these entities’ disparate and sprawling databases and allows for the effective sorting, management and cross-referencing of information contained therein.
These capabilities can be put to predictive purposes – for example, soldiers in Afghanistan used the tool to combine maps, intelligence reports, and reports of roadside bombings to plan missions. As a result, Bloomberg dubbed Palantir the War on Terror’s “secret weapon,” and Gotham also became of intense interest to law enforcement agencies the world over.
Due to the veil of secrecy surrounding Palantir’s commercial activities, the total number of forces employing the technology globally is unknown – although the company isn’t only opaque about what services it provides to which clients, but has been outright dishonest at the nature of its government partnerships in the past.
Usage metrics
In 2018, it was revealed police in New Orleans utilized Palantir software to trace targets’ ties to gang members, link suspects’ criminal histories, analyze social media, and forecast the likelihood individuals would commit crimes or become a victim thereof.
Several high-profile convictions of violent, murderous drug gangs were secured in the process, although it was operated in total secrecy for five years until exposure by tech website the Verge, with even the city council totally unaware.
The tendency toward concealment may at least in part be attributable to public outcry over predictive policing programs, which exhibit seemingly invariable racial bias. Even algorithms that do not specifically use race as a metric have been found prone to this prejudice, due to the inclusion of ancillary variables such as socio-economic background, education, and location.
Still, significant light was shed on how authorities use Gotham, and what information it collates, in September 2020, when two Los Angeles Police Department training documents – ‘Intermediate Course’ and ‘Advance Course’ – used to instruct officers on the workings of the system were leaked.
The data collected on citizens – both law-abiding and those with criminal records, or suspected of having committed a crime, or even being connected in any way to individuals who have – includes sex, race, names, contact details, addresses, prior warrants, mugshots, surveillance photos, personal relationships, past and current employers, and even tattoos, scars, piercings and other identifying features.
According to an ‘LAPD Palantir Usage Metrics’ document, in excess of 5,000 officers – accounting for half the Department’s members – had access to Gotham in 2016, and in that year, they collectively ran around 60,000 searches through the system in support of over 10,000 cases.
Such a cutting-edge service doesn’t come cheap, with subscriptions running to millions of dollars annually. This sizable investment comes despite questions hanging over Palantir’s predictive policing effectiveness, which may suggest the software’s value to authorities doesn’t necessarily lie in its crime-fighting prowess.
Official figures indicate violent crime rates remained virtually unchanged in Los Angeles from 2009 to 2019, while aggravated assaults increased. However, non-violent crime did fall over the same period, in particular burglary and vehicle theft.
‘Without any safeguards
Troublingly, crucial portions of Palantir’s NHS contract are entirely redacted, including sections titled “limit of parties’ liability,”“authorised user groups,” and “data integration and analytics capability for self-service” – which covers how many “authorised users” are permitted to create and modify tools designed using the data, and the data sets involved.
In other words, the public presently has no way of knowing precisely what private information Palantir has been granted access to, how it will be used, and with who and what it can be shared with.
Shocking stuff indeed, yet the mainstream UK media and lawmakers alike have been almost entirely silent on what should at the very least be the subject of intense national debate. Amazingly, the company’s name has been mentioned a grand total of twice in parliamentary debates over the course of 2020, and only once in a critical context.
This wall of establishment silence stands in stark contrast to the US, where legislators – including Senator Elizabeth Warren – have prominently raised privacy concerns over Palantir’s participation in ‘HHS Protect’, a program launched by the Department of Health and Human Services to track the spread of coronavirus. Under its auspices, the company harvests data from a variety of federal, state and local government sources, healthcare facilities, colleges, and more.
“The inclusion of Protected Health Information in this database raises serious privacy concerns,” a coalition of Democratic senators wrote in July. “Neither HHS nor Palantir has publicly detailed what it plans to do with this, or what privacy safeguards have been put in place, if any. We are concerned that, without any safeguards, data in HHS Protect could be used by other federal agencies in unexpected, unregulated, and potentially harmful ways.”
While ministers claim life in the UK will begin returning to “normal” around Easter 2021, the length of the deal places Palantir in a position of immense and entirely unaccountable privilege at the heart of an institution which theoretically provides vital services to every British citizen, for the next two years and potentially beyond.
Readers may wish to ask themselves who or what their elected representatives are truly working for, and which interests they ultimately serve – or better yet, pose these queries to parliamentarians directly.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
With Biden’s New Threats, the Russia Discourse is More Reckless and Dangerous Than Ever
The U.S. media demands inflammatory claims be accepted with no evidence, while hacking behavior routinely engaged in by the U.S. is depicted as aberrational.
By Glenn Greenwald | December 23, 2020
To justify Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump, leading Democrats and their key media allies for years competed with one another to depict what they called “Russia’s interference in our elections” in the most apocalyptic terms possible. They fanatically rejected the view of the Russian Federation repeatedly expressed by President Obama — that it is a weak regional power with an economy smaller than Italy’s capable of only threatening its neighbors but not the U.S. — and instead cast Moscow as a grave, even existential, threat to U.S. democracy, with its actions tantamount to the worst security breaches in U.S. history.
This post-2016 mania culminated with prominent liberal politicians and journalists (as well as John McCain) declaring Russia’s activities surrounding the 2016 [election] to be an “act of war” which, many of them insisted, was comparable to Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attack — the two most traumatic attacks in modern U.S. history which both spawned years of savage and destructive war, among other things.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) repeatedly demanded that Russia’s 2016 “interference” be treated as “an act of war.” Hillary Clinton described Russian hacking as “a cyber 9/11.” And Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) on MSNBC in early February, 2018, pronounced Russia “a hostile foreign power” whose 2016 meddling was the “equivalent” of Pearl Harbor, “very much on par” with the “seriousness” of the 1941 attack in Hawaii that helped prompt four years of U.S. involvement in a world war.
With the Democrats, under Joe Biden, [presumably] just weeks away from assuming control of the White House and the U.S. military and foreign policy that goes along with it, the discourse from them and their media allies about Russia is becoming even more unhinged and dangerous. Moscow’s alleged responsibility for the recently revealed, multi-pronged hack of U.S. Government agencies and various corporate servers is asserted — despite not a shred of evidence, literally, having yet been presented — as not merely proven fact, but as so obviously true that it is off-limits from doubt or questioning.
Any questioning of this claim will be instantly vilified by the Democrats’ extremely militaristic media spokespeople as virtual treason. “Now the president is not just silent on Russia and the hack. He is deliberately running defense for the Kremlin by contradicting his own Secretary of State on Russian responsibility,” pronounced CNN’s national security reporter Jim Sciutto, who last week depicted Trump’s attempted troop withdrawal from Syria and Germany as “ceding territory” and furnishing “gifts” to Putin. More alarmingly, both the rhetoric to describe the hack and the retaliation being threatened are rapidly spiraling out of control.
Democrats (along with some Republicans long obsessed with The Russian Threat, such as Mitt Romney) are casting the latest alleged hack by Moscow in the most melodramatic terms possible, ensuring that Biden will enter the White House with tensions sky-high with Russia and facing heavy pressure to retaliate aggressively. Biden’s top national security advisers and now Biden himself have, with no evidence shown to the public, repeatedly threatened aggressive retaliation against the country with the world’s second-largest nuclear stockpile.
Congressman Jason Crow (D-CO) — one of the pro-war Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee who earlier this year joined with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) to block Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan — announced: “this could be our modern day, cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor,” adding: “Our nation is under assault.” The second-ranking Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin (D-IL), pronounced: “This is virtually a declaration of war by Russia.”
Meanwhile, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), who has for years been casting Russia as a grave threat to the U.S. while Democrats mocked him as a relic of the Cold War (before they copied and then surpassed him), described the latest hack as “the equivalent of Russian bombers flying undetected over the entire country.” The GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee also blasted Trump for his failure to be “aggressively speaking out and protesting and taking punitive action,” though — like virtually every prominent figure demanding tough “retaliation” — Romney failed to specify what he had in mind that would be sufficient retaliation for “the equivalent of Russian bombers flying undetected over the entire country.”
For those keeping track at home: that’s two separate “Pearl Harbors” in less than four years from Moscow (or, if you prefer, one Pearl Harbor and one 9/11). If Democrats actually believe that, it stands to reason that they will be eager to embrace a policy of belligerence and aggression toward Russia. Many of them are demanding this outright, mocking Trump for failing to attack Russia — despite no evidence that they were responsible — while their well-trained liberal flock is suggesting that the non-response constitutes some form of “high treason.”
Indeed, the Biden team has been signalling that they intend to quickly fulfill demands for aggressive retaliation. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Biden “accused President Trump [] of ‘irrational downplaying’” of the hack while “warning Russia that he would not allow the intrusion to ‘go unanswered’ after he takes office.” Biden emphasized that once the intelligence assessment is complete, “we will respond, and probably respond in kind.”
Threats and retaliation between the U.S. and Russia are always dangerous, but particularly so now. One of the key nuclear arms agreements between the two nuclear-armed nations, the New START treaty, will expire in February unless Putin and Biden can successfully negotiate a renewal: sixteen days after Biden is [tentatively] scheduled to take office. “That will force Mr. Biden to strike a deal to prevent one threat — a nuclear arms race — while simultaneously threatening retaliation on another,” observed the Times.
This escalating rhetoric from Washington about Russia, and the resulting climate of heightened tensions, are dangerous in the extreme. They are also based in numerous myths, deceits and falsehoods:
First, absolutely no evidence of any kind has been presented to suggest, let alone prove, that Russia is responsible for these hacks. It goes without saying that it is perfectly plausible that Russia could have done this: it’s the sort of thing that every large power from China and Iran to the U.S. and Russia have the capability to do and wield against virtually every other country including one another.
But if we learned nothing else over the last several decades, we should know that accepting claims that emanate from the U.S. intelligence community about adversaries without a shred of evidence is madness of the highest order. We just had a glaring reminder of the importance of this rule: just weeks before the election, countless mainstream media outlets laundered and endorsed the utterly false claim that the documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop were “Russian disinformation,” only for officials to acknowledge once the harm was done that there was no evidence — zero — of Russian involvement.
Yet that is exactly what the overwhelming bulk of media outlets are doing again: asserting that Russia is behind these hacks despite having no evidence of its truth. The New York Times’ Michael Barbaro, host of the paper’s popular The Daily podcast, asked his colleague, national security reporter David Sanger, what evidence exists to assert that Russia did this. As Barbaro put it, even Sanger is “allowing that early conclusions could all be wrong, but that it’s doubtful.” Indeed, Sanger acknowledged to Barbaro that they have no proof, asserting instead that the basis on which he is relying is that Russia possesses the sophistication to carry out such a hack (as do several other nation-states), along with claiming that the hack has what he calls the “markings” of Russian hackers.
But this tactic was exactly the same one used by former intelligence officials, echoed by these same media outlets, to circulate the false pre-election claim that the documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop were “Russian disinformation”: namely, they pronounced in lockstep, the material from Hunter’s laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information.” This was also exactly the same tactic used by the U.S. intelligence community in 2001 to falsely blame Iraq for the anthrax attacks, claiming that their chemical analysis revealed a substance that was “a trademark of the Iraqi biological weapons program.”
These media outlets will, if pressed, acknowledge their lack of proof that Russia did this. Despite this admitted lack of proof, media outlets are repeatedly stating Russian responsibility as proven fact.
“Scope of Russian Hacking Becomes Clear: Multiple U.S. Agencies Were Hit,” one New York Times headline proclaimed, and the first line of that article, co-written by Sanger, stated definitively: “The scope of a hacking engineered by one of Russia’s premier intelligence agencies became clearer on Monday.” The Washington Post deluged the public with identically certain headlines.
Nobody in the government has been as definitive in asserting Russian responsibility as corporate media outlets. Even Trump’s hawkish Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, crafted his accusation against Moscow with caveats and uncertainty: “I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.”
If actual evidence ultimately emerges demonstrating Russian responsibility, it would not alter how dangerous it is that — less than twenty years after the Iraq WMD debacle and less than a couple of years after media endorsement of endless Russiagate falsehoods — the most influential media outlets continue to mindlessly peddle as Truth whatever the intelligence community feeds them, without the need to see any evidence that what they’re claiming is actually true. Even more alarmingly, large sectors of the public that venerate these outlets continue to believe that what they hear from them must be true, no matter how many times they betray that trust. The ease with which the CIA can disseminate whatever messaging it wants through friendly media outlets is stunning.
Second, the very idea that this hack could be compared to rogue and wildly aberrational events such as Pearl Harbor or the 9/11 attack is utterly laughable on its face. One has to be drowning in endless amounts of jingoistic self-delusion to believe that this hack — or, for that matter, the 2016 “election interference” — is a radical departure from international norms as opposed to a perfect reflection of them.
Just as was true of 2016 fake Facebook pages and Twitter bots, it is not an exaggeration to say that the U.S. Government engages in hacking attacks of this sort, and ones far more invasive, against virtually every country on the planet, including Russia, on a weekly basis. That does not mean that this kind of hacking is either justified or unjustified. It does mean, however, that depicting it as some particularly dastardly and incomparably immoral act that requires massive retaliation requires a degree of irrationality and gullibility that is bewildering to behold.
The NSA reporting enabled by Edward Snowden by itself proved that the NSA spies on virtually anyone it can. Indeed, after reviewing the archive back in 2013, I made the decision that I would not report on U.S. hacks of large adversary countries such as China and Russia because it was so commonplace for all of these countries to hack one another as aggressively and intrusively as they could that it was hardly newsworthy to report on this (the only exception was when there was a substantial reason to view such spying as independently newsworthy, such as Sweden’s partnering with NSA to spy on Russia in direct violation of the denials Swedish officials voiced to their public).
Other news outlets who had access to Snowden documents, particularly The New York Times, were not nearly as circumspect in exposing U.S. spying on large nation-state adversaries. As a result, there is ample proof published by those outlets (sometimes provoking Snowden’s strong objections) that the U.S. does exactly what Russia is alleged to have done here — and far worse.
“Even as the United States made a public case about the dangers of buying from [China’s] Huawei, classified documents show that the National Security Agency was creating its own back doors — directly into Huawei’s networks,” reported The New York Times’ David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth in 2013, adding that “the agency pried its way into the servers in Huawei’s sealed headquarters in Shenzhen, China’s industrial heart.”
In 2013, the Guardian revealed “an NSA attempt to eavesdrop on the Russian leader, Dmitry Medvedev, as his phone calls passed through satellite links to Moscow,” and added: “foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts.” Meanwhile, “Sweden has been a key partner for the United States in spying on Russia and its leadership, Swedish television said on Thursday,” noted Reuters, citing what one NSA document described as “a unique collection on high-priority Russian targets, such as leadership, internal politics.”
Other reports revealed that the U.S. had hacked into the Brazilian telecommunications system to collect data on the whole population, and was spying on Brazil’s key leaders (including then-President Dilma Rousseff) as well as its most important companies such as its oil giant Petrobras and its Ministry of Mines and Energy. The Washington Post reported: “The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.” And on and on.
[One amazing though under-appreciated episode related to all this: the same New York Times reporter who revealed the details about massive NSA hacking of Chinese government and industry, Nicole Perlroth, subsequently urged (in tweets she has now deleted) that Snowden not be pardoned on the ground that, according to her, he revealed legitimate NSA spying on U.S. adversaries. In reality, it was actually she, Perlorth, not Snowden, who chose to expose NSA spying on China, provoking Snowden’s angry objections when she did so based on his view this was a violation of the framework he created for what should and should not be revealed; in other words, not only did Perlroth urge the criminal prosecution of a source on which she herself relied, an absolutely astonishing thing for any reporter to do, but so much worse, she did so by falsely accusing that source of doing something that she, Perlroth, had done herself: namely, reveal extensive U.S. hacking of China].
What all of this makes demonstrably clear is that only the most deluded and uninformed person could believe that Russian hacking of U.S. agencies and corporations — if it happened — is anything other than totally normal and common behavior between these countries. Harvard Law Professor and former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith, reviewing growing demands for retaliation, wrote in an excellent article last week entitled “Self-Delusion on the Russia Hack: The U.S. regularly hacks foreign governmental computer systems on a massive scale”:
The lack of self-awareness in these and similar reactions to the Russia breach is astounding. The U.S. government has no principled basis to complain about the Russia hack, much less retaliate for it with military means, since the U.S. government hacks foreign government networks on a huge scale every day. Indeed, a military response to the Russian hack would violate international law . . . .
As the revelations from leaks of information from Edward Snowden made plain, the United States regularly penetrates foreign governmental computer systems on a massive scale, often (as in the Russia hack) with the unwitting assistance of the private sector, for purposes of spying. It is almost certainly the world’s leader in this practice, probably by a lot. The Snowden documents suggested as much, as does the NSA’s probable budget. In 2016, after noting “problems with cyber intrusions from Russia,” Obama boasted that the United States has “more capacity than anybody … offensively” . . . .
Because of its own practices, the U.S. government has traditionally accepted the legitimacy of foreign governmental electronic spying in U.S. government networks. After the notorious Chinese hack of the Office of Personnel Management database, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said: “You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did. If we had the opportunity to do that, I don’t think we’d hesitate for a minute.” The same Russian agency that appears to have carried out the hack revealed this week also hacked into unclassified emails in the White House and Defense and State Departments in 2014-2015. The Obama administration deemed it traditional espionage and did not retaliate. “It was information collection, which is what nation states—including the United States—do,” said Obama administration cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel this week.
But over the last four years, Americans, particularly those who feed on liberal media outlets, have been drowned in so much mythology about the U.S. and Russia that they have no capacity to critically assess the claims being made, and — just as they were led to believe about “Russia’s 2016 interference in Our Sacred Elections” — are easily convinced that what Russia did is some shocking and extreme crime the likes of which are rarely seen in international relations. In reality, their own government is the undisputed world champion in perpetrating these acts, and has been for years if not decades.
Third, these demands for “retaliation” are so reckless because they are almost always unaccompanied by any specifics. Even if Moscow’s responsibility is demonstrated, what is the U.S. supposed to do in response? If your answer is that they should hack Russia back, rest assured the NSA and CIA are always trying to hack Russia as much as it possibly can, long before this event.
If the answer is more sanctions, that would be just performative and pointless, aside from wildly hypocritical. Any reprisals more severe than that would be beyond reckless, particularly with the need to renew nuclear arms control agreements looming. And if you are someone demanding retaliation, do you believe that Russia, China, Brazil and all the other countries invaded by NSA hackers have the same right of retaliation against the U.S., or does the U.S. occupy a special place with special entitlements that all other countries lack?
What we have here, yet again, is the classic operation of the intelligence community feeding serious accusations about a nuclear-armed power to an eagerly gullible corporate media, with the media mindlessly disseminating it without evidence, all toward ratcheting up tensions between these two nuclear-armed powers and fortifying a mythology of the U.S. as grand victim but never perpetrator.
If you ever find yourself wondering how massive military budgets and a posture of Endless War are seemingly invulnerable to challenge, this pathological behavior — from a now-enduring union of the intelligence community, corporate media outlets, and the Democratic Party — provides one key piece of the puzzle.
Ex-intel official listed among spooks rejecting Hunter Biden scandal as Russian disinfo NEVER SIGNED that letter
RT | December 18, 2020
An ex-intelligence official listed on a letter suggesting that allegations of influence peddling by Joe Biden’s family stemmed from Russian disinformation told the National Review that he had never seen nor signed the document.
The news outlet discovered the discrepancy as it sought comments from the 51 people listed on the letter as to whether their assessment had changed in light of confirmation that Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, had been under FBI investigation for more than a year.
National Review said that when it contacted Gregory Treverton, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, he apparently misunderstood the query, saying, “This is the first I’ve seen of this, but happy to sign.” When the newspaper clarified that he had already been named as a signatory, he said that he had never seen the letter but would have signed if he had received the request. He made that statement despite acknowledging that he hadn’t “looked at” the federal investigation of Hunter Biden.
Treverton’s haphazard response and the fact that his name was falsely used to add weight to the letter may undermine the credibility of an increasingly popular technique used by former US spooks to influence public opinion and provide fodder for mainstream-media narratives. A similar letter signed by dozens of former officials with the CIA and other intelligence agencies was deployed last month to show that national security experts agreed that President Donald Trump should give up his legal fight over the November 3 election and concede that Biden had won.
As in the case of the earlier letter, which was dated October 19, CNN and other outlets trumpeted the consensus of the security experts to support their assertions, arguing that Trump didn’t have a legitimate fraud case to nullify Biden’s media-declared election victory. But claims in the earlier letter were made even more dubious when Hunter Biden himself announced last week that he was under federal investigation.
Former CIA chiefs Mike Hayden and John Brennen were among signatories to the letter, as was ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Their baseless argument that Moscow was likely behind the allegations against the Bidens was used by the media as justification to dismiss the New York Post’s October scoops documenting the family’s alleged influence-peddling.
The signatories conceded that they had no evidence that the emails cited by the Post weren’t genuine, but suggested that the trove of data found on a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden fit with Russia’s agenda of discrediting Trump’s opponent. They asserted that the emails had “the classic earmarks” of a Russian disinformation campaign. The ex-spooks also ignored other evidence brought against the Bidens, including on-the-record comments by a former business partner, Tony Bobulinski.
The large number of signatories was used to claim strong credibility for the allegations in the letter. “The real power here, however, is the number of working-level intelligence-community officers who want the American people to know that once again, the Russians are interfering,” former Brennan aide Nick Shapiro tweeted at the time.
Joe Biden cited the letter in his final debate with Trump, saying there were “50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he is accusing me of is a Russian plant.”
The National Review said it was unable so far to determine whether any of the 50 other signatories listed on the letter had been included without being notified.
US Media Suffers From ‘Russia Hack Syndrome’ & Provides No Proof of Breach, as Usual
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 18.12.2020
The “Russia did it narrative” concerning the alleged breach into US federal cyber infrastructure is being circulated by the media despite the US government not formally blaming Moscow for the supposed hack. American scholars Gilbert Doctorow and Earl Rasmussen have discussed the accusations and the timing of the media campaign.
On 17 December, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a warning saying that American government agencies, critical infrastructure entities, and private sector organisations had been compromised “by an advanced persistent threat (APT) actor” since at least March 2020.
The story popped up on Saturday, with Reuters and The Washington Post reporting about the alleged cyber intrusion into the US Treasury and Commerce departments and pointing the finger at Russia, citing “people familiar with the matter”. Russian Ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov rejected the media claims during a video conference held by Georgetown University and suggested establishing a platform for a dialogue between the US and Russian intelligence communities.
Timing of the Allegations Speaks Volumes
The timing of the alleged hack evokes strong memories of the 2016-2017 transition period when Russia was accused of breaching the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) servers, according to Gilbert Doctorow, an international relations and Russian affairs analyst.
“One constant feature of American foreign policy going back at least to the last transition in power following Donald Trump’s election in November 2016 is that in this transition the wreckers use the ‘interregnum’ to prevent reasonable policies from being implemented by the incoming administration”, he says.
He recollects that at that time Donald Trump’s chances of reaching an accommodation with Russia were upset “by the illegal and unjustified expropriation of Russian consular property in December 2016, for example, and the phony Steele dossier was released before Trump took the oath of office”. The latest accusations mentioning Russia came on the heels of the 2020 Electoral College vote in favour of ex-Vice President Joseph Biden, who earlier vowed to increase pressure on Moscow.
Doctorow believes the Democratic-controlled House may use the recent anti-Russia allegations to put forward a bill on tougher sanctions, likely related to the Gazprom-led Nord Stream 2 pipeline project that is heading towards completion.
“On the other hand, the Senate may not be very cooperative, especially if the Republicans win the two vacant seats in Georgia during the January election run-off”, he suggests. “And the incoming Secretary of State Blinken is unlikely to want to strike the Russian jugular – he is on record as favouring SALT renewal, which would be impossible if there are draconian sanctions about to be imposed.”
During his annual press conference on 17 December Russian President Vladimir Putin commented on the spying allegations promoted by the mainstream media in the US, suggesting the anonymous sources behind these reports are, in fact, US officials and intelligence agencies. The Russian president noted that these very structures were behind the similarly groundless claims against Moscow following the 2016 presidential elections, adding the new reports of “Russian hackers” could have been fabricated at their behest.
Hacking Allegations Don’t Hold Water, Again
“As with the DNC hacks and Russiagate we once again find the ‘Russians’ being accused of hacking absent any evidence”, says Earl Rasmussen, executive vice president of the Washington-based think tank Eurasia Centre. “For one, I am tired of the Russia Hack Syndrome.”
The scholar recalls that four years ago Russia was accused of “exfiltrating” thousands of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee’s servers and passing them to WikiLeaks which subsequently released the trove in the summer of 2016.
In January 2017, the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) formally accused Russia of the supposed breach, while in July 2018 Special Counsel Robert Mueller assigned with the task of looking into the alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow indicted a number of Russian individuals said to be officers of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) for the reported hack. The accusations were based on the conclusions of the DNC’s private cyber defence contractor CrowdStrike since neither the FBI, nor any other US government intelligence agency have to date examined the committee’s hardware.
“[However], recently unclassified sworn testimony of CrowdStrike officials and senior intelligence officials all stated that there was no evidence of a hack or exfiltration”, Rasmussen highlights, citing CrowdStrike President Shawn Henry’s December 2017 admission under oath that the cyber firm “did not have concrete evidence that the data was exfiltrated from the DNC”.
CrowdStrike claimed at the time that the intruders were “two Russian espionage groups”, Cozy Bear (APT29) and Fancy Bear (APT28), suggesting with a “low” to “medium”-level of confidence that they “may indicate affiliation” with Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and Main Intelligence Department (GRU), respectively. Moscow summarily shredded the assumptions as absurd.
The DNC contractor is also known for a groundless claim that the “Russian” group Fancy Bear hacked a Ukrainian artillery app which led to heavy losses of howitzers in 2016 that was later debunked by both the Ukrainian Defence Ministry and the US state-owned media Voice of America.
Yet, the aforementioned inconsistencies did not prevent the US intelligence community and mainstream media from continuously accusing Russia of the alleged DNC hack for over four years, Rasmussen notes.
“I think the credibility of US intelligence, law enforcement, and media are pretty much discredited”, he says. “I am leery of anything coming from the media and their so-called sources without significant evidence. Besides, our own government is one of the biggest and most sophisticated cyber threats in the world”.
Jack Dorsey, the CIA and Twitter Censorship in the Age of Covid-19
By Vanessa Beeley |
Unlimited Hangout| December 10, 2020
Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, has embedded himself in some of the most powerful global influencer complexes. His techno-mining of African potential and the increasing use of Twitter as a surveillance tool for the corporatocracy have generated the opportunity for Dorsey to play an increasingly pivotal role in the roll-out of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset.
In Part 1 of this series on the emergence of the “celebrity humanitarianism” complex of the 21st century and its role in the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, I covered the evolution of Hollywood actor Sean Penn from anti-Iraq-war activist to establishment narrative endorser and advocate for the predator class factions dominated by the Clinton family cabal and globalism.
Penn was one of the three men together on a beach holiday that was featured in a Daily Mail article in November 2020. Another of the three global influencers strolling on the beach with Penn was “technology entrepreneur” and the CEO and co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. Dorsey’s meteoric rise to fame as a leading innovator in the world of data technology began to falter in 2016/17 when 247 Wall Street listed Dorsey among the twenty worst CEOs in America. In this article, I will investigate Dorsey’s involvement in the narrative management of Covid-19 and his potential contribution to the roll out of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset that has been accelerated by the Coronavirus “pandemic” exercise.
Like Penn, Dorsey is a supporter of the Democratic Party. Dorsey broke ranks with the billionaire bloc to donate $ 5600 to Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign after the June 2019 Democratic debates. Dorsey cites Gabbard’s anti-war stance as the reason for his support. Dorsey also contributed to the campaigns of Andrew Yang and Jay Inslee. Dorsey commends Yang for his “focus on artificial intelligence and automation” (emphasis added). Dorsey has also endorsed the philanthrocapitalist “climate change” portfolio – in a tweet Dorsey says that Gabbard and Yang’s “voices are important to surface in debates”, adding:
“Along with systemically addressing climate change and economic injustice, these are the key issues of global consequence I want to see considered and discussed more.”
Dorsey as well as the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, were subpoenaed to a US Senate hearing in November 2020, where their platforms were accused of anti-conservative bias after their effective suppression of the Hunter Biden China scandal. Of the two social media platforms, Twitter was deemed to be the most aggressive in its censorship of the New York Post article.
US conservatives were outraged that a story critical of Joe Biden, with potential to turn the election in favour of Donald Trump, was being buried by platforms as influential as Twitter and Facebook. Dorsey’s rationale for this unprecedented censorship had been that Twitter policies prohibit “directly distributing content obtained through hacking that contains private information”. Dorsey later back-pedalled but by then, the story had effectively been “disappeared” and damage to the Biden campaign had been successfully limited.
Dorsey’s apparent absorption into the transnational billionaire complex controlling the global response to the Covid-19 “pandemic” and orchestrating the Fourth Industrial Revolution, will be explored throughout this article.
From Square to Covid-19 – Dorsey transfers $ 1 billion to “disarm the pandemic”
In addition to Twitter, Dorsey is also the CEO of Square, a digital payments platform. In April 2020, Dorsey transferred an alleged 28% of his wealth from Square to his Start Small LLC (SS) to fund Covid-19 relief globally. The $1 billion donation represents the most significant “philanthropic” donation made by the tech-billionaire during his entire career.
One month after the launch of SS, Dorsey announced on Twitter the disbursement of $87.8 million to a number of initiatives apparently responding to fall-out from Covid-19 response measures. The disbursements included $600,000 to help develop “high impact digital learning tools to support special needs students and English language learners who are most affected by the crisis and will experience the most learning loss during school closures”.
The reality is that none of these measures would be necessary if scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, medical staff and experts opposing the disproportionate response to a virus [seemingly] less deadly than seasonal flu had been taken into consideration by the institutions and governments rolling out the draconian “lockdown” of global populations in preparation for the Great Reset. Dorsey’s and Twitter’s role in ensuring the censorship and de-platforming of dissenting voices is also examined in this article.
Let us not forget that “a report from the Institute for Policy Studies found that, while tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs during the coronavirus ‘pandemic’, America’s ultra-wealthy elite have seen their net worth surge by $ 82 billion in just 23 days” as picked up by journalist, Cory Morningstar, who is also cited below.
In May 2020, Dorsey donated $10 million to Sean Penn’s CORE response which supported CORE’s national expansion of Covid-19 drive-through test sites “into Atlanta, Detroit, New Orleans and the Navajo Nation”. The origins of the CORE initiative are examined in detail in Part 1 of this series. Dorsey is also credited with persuading Penn to join Twitter in May 2020.
As Dorsey stated in his April 2020 tweet:
“After we disarm this pandemic, the focus will shift to girl’s health and education, and [Universal Basic Income] or UBI.”
Dorsey’s involvement in the promotion of UBI demonstrates his endorsement of measures which are designed to shore up economic privilege for members of the global billionaire cartels while asset-stripping and disenfranchising the working classes and what remains of an already decimated middle class in the West.
Cory Morningstar, one of the foremost voices speaking out about the unprecedented power grab being facilitated by the Covid-19 narratives, gave me this statement with regards to the covert threat of UBI:
Covid-19 is the catalyst for the Great Reset, in which universal basic income plays a securing role. Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the strategic solution to protect the ruling classes from Molotov cocktails and global civil unrest by those being methodically dispossessed of their occupations, dignity and self-preservation – the working class, much middle class, peasantry, artisans, and those that comprise the informal economy that presides in the Global South. Disclosures on coming “disbanding of existing safety-net programs” are not included in the foundation-funded marketing campaigns.
When UBI begins to be rolled out globally, one can expect public healthcare to slowly disappear, replaced by privatized services (largely Telehealth). Further, UBI payments will be linked to benefits via blockchain – ensuring full spectrum compliance and servitude of whole societies. Billionaires are supporting/financing UBI marketing campaigns for good reason: it is preferable to pay a pittance to the citizenry than to risk losing the social license that allows for the continued decimation of the Earth, coupled with the continued exploitation of those most oppressed and vulnerable.
The real motive behind Jack Dorsey’s interest in Africa
Dorsey’s focus on UBI and girl’s health and education is mirrored, coincidentally, by the interests of the Clinton Foundation in Africa. Dorsey had been planning to relocate to Africa for six months in 2020, plans that were apparently derailed by the Coronavirus crisis although a more likely obstacle was investor concern that his pivot to Square and the opportunities presented for digital payment remodeling in Africa’s cash-based society would lead to his neglect of Twitter.
In 2015, Bill and Chelsea Clinton led an entourage of powerful elite sponsors of the Clinton Foundation to Africa for Bill Clinton’s 12th visit to the resource-plundered continent. Dorsey joined the Clintons, Microsoft (via Bill Gates), Facebook and Google in a bid to ensnare the developing market sector into their accelerator programmes and debt enslavement campaigns. Visa, Mastercard and Salesforce are also establishing venture investments in African start-ups.
According to “Witney Schneidman, a Brookings fellow with the Africa Growth Initiative and former deputy secretary of state Clinton administration”, Dorsey was in the right place at the right time. In November 2019, Dorsey tweeted that Africa “will define the future (especially the bitcoin one)” The African continent comprises 54 countries with a combined population of 1.3 billion people with the highest population growth rate in the world. The world’s largest population of people without banks, trading in cash. Ripe for exploitation by the world’s robber barons and financial-tech-carpet-baggers.
In November 2020, Dorsey was the closing keynote speaker for the Africa Fintech Summit sponsored by Dedalus Global and Ibex Frontier. Dorsey is described as a “futurist”, a “visionary”, and one of the “biggest influencers in tech ecosystems worldwide”. “With an unbanked population of 66% and a credit card penetration rate that averages 1.5%, the applications for crypto in sub-Saharan Africa can only help solidify Dorsey’s interest in the continent” (Africa News )
Dorsey is investing in the reinvention of colonialism as smart growth, the new-age digital colonialism. The Facebook’s internet footprint in Africa and its Orwellian ambitions for that continent are covered in detail in this article by investigative journalist, Cory Morningstar. Morningstar has showed in her recent and past work how the billionaire class seeks to facilitate the absorption of the Global South into a paternalistic, inherently racist, Global North power structure that will suck the lifeblood out of these nations via “philanthropic” channels that have been constructed to mine data, resources, livelihoods and cultural infrastructure until it is an overpopulated, micro-managed colony with no access to development unless it is plugged into the predator class mothership.
“As Africa meets the 4IR Fourth Industrial Revolution], its youth will be one of its most important assets” – August 2020, World Economic Forum: How can Africa succeed in the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
Dorsey, the Clintons and the technological “disruption” of Haiti
Dorsey’s history of rubbing shoulders with the Clinton clan goes way back. Just as Sean Penn was heavily involved with the Clinton’s rapacious policies in Haiti, Dorsey was a keynote speaker at the Haiti Tech Summit in 2018, an event that is also described as the “Davos of the Caribbean”. The summit was organised by the Global Startup Ecosystem which, according to their website, “hosts the world’s first and largest digital accelerator- supporting 1000 companies from 90 countries every year”. Target regions are Africa, America, Asia, Europe, Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East.
Taken from their website, in 2017, GSE launched a 13 year initiative to accelerate emerging market ecosystems every year until 2030 in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals.
The “iconic” Haiti Tech Summit was the pilot launch. The company was projecting 54 tech summits in 2020, to be held virtually and “across all major hubs globally”. Alongside Dorsey at the 2018 Haiti Tech summit were representatives from other Silicon Valley giants — Google, Facebook and YouTube. The end of summit message from the summit’s founder and GSE’s co-founder, Christine Souffrant Ntim, informed the audience that Haiti “was ready for disruption”. This is an unfortunate choice of words considering the decades of “disruption” that have been inflicted upon the semi-colonised island by a series of US administrations, dominated by the Clintons’ exploitation policies targeting Haiti.
Screenshot from Haitian Times video report on the Tech Summit 2018.
This is nothing less than implementation of UN Agenda 2030, an agenda that aims to privatise and seize control of land, resources, energy, education and to digitalise the world we live in, to bring us all into city-based data colonies that can be easily controlled and manipulated for the benefit of the vulture class – the billionaire elites who perceive this world to be their exclusive bread basket and the “little people” as the “useless” expendables.
GSE’s website lists Dorsey as a member of their speaker network that includes Ben Horowitz and Sophia, the world’s celebrity robot. Horowitz is co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that invests in technology start-ups, and their better-known investments include GitHub, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. GSE partners include LinkedIn, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and Forbes. GSE’s mission is to “prepare individuals and organisations for the digital age” according to Einstein Ntim, managing partner at GSE – a goal completely in line with the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Covid-19-facilitated Great Reset.
Dorsey and the Transition Integrity Project – Berggruen Institute
Dorsey’s involvement with the Berggruen Institute (BI) is an indication of his collaboration with some of the most powerful neoconservative influencers in US politics. BI is another transformational future-shaping conglomerate “promoting long term answers to the biggest challenges of the 21st Century”. Nicolas Berggruen is the co-founder and chairman of BI. Berggruen has been pivotal in the restructuring and reinventing of “democracy” for the new digital age. Berggruen used the institute as a launch pad for a number of government reform projects. These include the 21st Century Council which brought together former heads of state – with Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroder, Helle Thorning Schmidt and Nicolas Sarkozybeing just a few of names on the list. Dorsey was a member of the 21st Century Council and is one of Berggruen’s “people”.
Berggruen established the “Think Long Committee for California” in 2010. The committee included such neoconservative and “progressive” luminaries as Condoleeza Rice and Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) and its purpose was to effectively create a new set of rules for governance, using Agenda 21 Sustainable Development grants to impose regional governance.
Soros/Berggruen/von der Leyen
In 2012, Berggruen’s Council for the Future of Europe met in Berlin to discuss Europe Beyond the Crisis. Speeches were given by former UK Labour Party leader and criminal globalist, Tony Blair, billionaire influencer and transnational interventionist, George Soros and George Papandreou, former PM of Greece and last in a long line of corrupt imperialist sycophants. Dorsey has effectively embedded himself into one of the most influential and predatory of the neocon cartels. Dorsey is a minor in the billionaire circle but a major in identifying the foremost power hubs.
Berggruen is also behind the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), recently covered by investigative journalist, Whitney Webb, for Unlimited Hangout who described the TIP as:
“A group of Democratic Party insiders and former Obama and Clinton era officials as well as a cadre of “Never Trump” neoconservative Republicans have spent the past few months conducting simulations and “war games” regarding different 2020 election “doomsday” scenarios.”
Another sinister Berggruen programme is the “Transformations of the Human” which has all the hallmarks of a transhumanism agenda. The concept involves the placing of philosophers and artists in key research sites “to foster dialogue with technologists”. The “aim of the program is to render AI and Biotech visible as unusually potent experimental sites for reformulating our vocabulary for thinking about ourselves” which could be interpreted as reprogramming humanity. The findings will be fed back into the “production of both AI and biotech and to thereby contribute to both human and non-human flourishing” or perhaps to merge the two?
As investigative journalist, James Corbett, warns “are we ready to give up our humanity” to succumb to the “ethical use of technology to extend human capabilities?”. The redesigning or genetic modification of the human condition is not science fiction, it is the bedrock of the ideology of those who rule this world behind the facade of government.
As Julian Huxley, an influential English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist wrote, in the last century:
“… unless [civilised societies] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay …”
Huxley invented the term “transhumanism” just before he became President of the British Eugenics Society, 1959-62. Huxley was also the first Director General of UNESCO.
Author, Dean Koontz, described the age of Transhumanism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution very succinctly:
“We live in hubristic age, when politicians imagine themselves to be messiahs and when many in the sciences frankly discuss their dreams of creating a “post-human” civilization of genetically engineered supermen, ignorant of the fact that like minds have often come before them and have left no legacy but death, destruction, and despair.”
Dorsey’s close ties to those whose purpose is to reinstate a Silicon Valley-backed Democrat as US President and to oust President Trump who, to some degree, slowed down the global military interventionism of the neocon camp in Washington as well as Twitter’s record of protectionism of the Biden election campaign are perhaps what, currently, make Dorsey an accepted member of the overclass.
It should be no surprise, therefore, that Nicholas Pacilio, senior communications manager at Twitter, who deleted Trump tweets claiming (correctly) children are almost immune from Covid-19, was formerly the press secretary for Kamala Harris, Biden’s pick for vice president. Twitter’s proclaimed neutrality is rendered nonsensical by all the above and by their collaboration across the board with global influencers whose futurist agenda is reliant upon the acceptance of official Covid-19 narratives.
Dorsey’s anti-conservative Twitter censorship policy is also supported by online petition giant, Avaaz, who were instrumental in the fomenting of conflict in Syria from the outset in 2011 and well versed in the art of selling hate for Empire.
Bill Gates and Jack Dorsey – investing in civil unrest?
Dorsey and Covid-19 impresario, Bill Gates, are alleged indirect funders of the BAIL Project (BP). The project was established to bail out protestors who participated in the George Floyd demonstrations and riots. BAIL is reported to have connections to Antifa, an organisation associated with stoking civil unrest and being “primary instigators of violence at public rallies” according to declassified Department of Homeland Security and FBI studies from 2016, the first year of Trump’s presidency. While many of the reports linking Dorsey to BAIL and BAIL to Antifa can be described as “conservative”, Dorsey’s Start Small initiative has donated to Black Lives Matter, suspected to be another of the billionaire co-opted organisations designed to harness and control black power globally.
The Audacious Project (housed at TED) was seed-funded $ 250 million by Gates, Skoll and Dalio Foundations. The BAIL Project was one of the five recipients of $ 50 million funding from the Audacious Project and is partnered by TED directly according to their own website. The Audacious Project, “a new model to inspire change”, is yet another node in the philanthrocapitalist complex wreaking havoc globally under the pretext of building a better future for all. In reality, such groups are building a system that will make the world’s wealthiest class even wealthier and will give ever increasing control over the global resource inventory.
When the connection is made to the Transition Integrity Project and Gates and Dorsey’s suspected involvement in BAIL and potentially Antifa, it makes sense that these narrative builders of the Covid-19 paradigm would be behind the scenes of the planned civil unrest in the US.
Further evidence of Twitter’s role as a surveillance tool for US intelligence agencies and influencers on Covid-19 response came when The Intercept exposed the AI start-up Dataminr and that company’s involvement in the monitoring of the Floyd protests and provision of that data to police and security forces nationwide. While both Twitter and Dataminr deny any engagement in domestic surveillance, these accusations followed on from the 2016 controversies that aligned Twitter with the CIA as investors in, or partners of Dataminr. The Twitter-Dataminr collaboration permitted Dataminr to scan every public tweet as soon as it was published, giving them advance warning of any incoming protests or dissident action.
Despite the denial of surveillance activity by both Twitter and Dataminr, “monitoring activities and forwarding information to the police is clearly surveillance” explained Andrew Ferguson, author of “The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement.”
In 2016, Twitter allegedly asked that Dataminr stop providing intelligence agencies with Twitter tools and content but as TechCrunch reported:
“… Dataminr isn’t ending its relationship with the government altogether: Dataminir still counts In-Q-Tel, the non-profit investment arm of the CIA, as an investor. Dataminr has taken investment from Twitter, too, highlighting some of the conflicts that remain as tech companies fight for more transparency and autonomy from government control.”
Dataminr’s Yale leadership is believed to still have a $ 255,000 contract with the Department of Homeland Security. The protestations of Twitter and apparent withdrawal from US intelligence blood-hounding by Dataminr appear to be nothing more than smoke and mirrors designed to put the public off the scent.
However, perhaps even more relevant to the Twitter censorship of Covid-19 dissident media, scientists and medical experts, and famously, David Icke, all of whom were challenging establishment “science”, is perhaps also related to its partnership with Dataminr. In late 2016, Twitter told TechCrunch that Dataminr “uses public Tweets to sell breaking news alerts to […] government agencies such as the World Health Organisation” although the “not for surveillance” caveat was thrown in.
The billionaire complex apprentices, managing narratives for their mentors
Penn and Dorsey are not in the upper echelons of the ruling elite circles. They are the keen instruments of power, eager to please and to do the bidding of those in positions of power they perhaps aspire to one day. The wealthiest people in the world are providing funding for the Covid-19 response, with good reason. It is the portal to the world vision they have been working towards for decades, perhaps even centuries.
At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, January 2020, historian and philosopher, Yuval Harari, gave talks on the future of humanity. Harari talks about the “useless class”, he describes the data colonies that will be formed under some projected “dictator.” In the world, Harari envision, if a dissident’s mind can be read by a centralised AI data hub, he can be arrested for non-compliance with the dictatorship.
Of course, the global dictatorship is already here with the Covid-19 measures, the obligatory masking, martial law, the Army deployed to roll out testing and vaccines, mandatory vaccines (you will not be able to function in society without one), the incarceration of the elderly, the destitution and isolation of children in schools and distance learning, digitalised education systems. The future according to this totalitarian, neo-feudalist system is bleak for humanity unless we collectively wake up.
Penn and Dorsey are just two of a collection of useful pathways to the Great Reset. They are the fear-stokers and narrative managers, ensuring that people fear death, fear their own powerlessness against a “virus” that stalks them even in their own home.
As journalist, Peter Koenig, described earlier this year:
“The virus is just a clever idea to use an invisible enemy for instilling fear, worldwide, by this minuscule, insanely rich and psychotically power-hungry elite to put the entire world population to its knees. FEAR that obliterates the human immune system and may bring about a range of illnesses far worse than covid-19, including cancer, coronary diseases, diabetes – and much more.”
It is time to recognise that death is an inevitable part of our existence as human beings, that visions of immortality offered by those who will distort and twist humanity out of shape to create a dystopian future for all but the very privileged few, are nothing but the erosion of all that is human. Being human is what will enable us to fight back. When we remember what we cherish as human beings, a smile, a hug, the comfort of touch and the warmth of human interaction perhaps we will start fighting before we lose what makes us who we are to the vision of those who see us as ultimately expendable.
The Empire Doubles Down: Open Society Foundations Will Now Be Run by Lord Malloch Brown
By Matthew Ehret | Strategic Culture Foundation | December 11, 2020
The hubris of empire has always struck me with shock and awe.
I mean it really takes balls to get caught with a prostitute and instead of apologizing to your wife, to instead buy the hooker a new fur coat and parade her publicly at a public event.
Such has been the case with George Soros’ long time bosom buddy Lord Mark Malloch Brown who after being revealed as a leading force behind the software used by the infamous Dominion Voting systems via Smartmatic (which transferred its operating systems to Dominion via Sequoia Inc), has now been made the president of Soros’ global Open Society Foundations.
What is the logic behind such a decision?
Simple: If these characters were truly guilty of the crimes they are being accused of, then why would they behave so unapologetically in public? Surely to be so confident, they must be innocent of wrongdoing. It may sound overly simplistic, but this formula has proven most effective in recent years.
This is a lesson learned just a few months go by Sir Kim Darroch (former British Ambassador to the USA 2016-2019). After having failed in his mission to “flood the zone” with British intelligence operatives to influence Trump’s perception of reality, Sir Kim found himself honoured as a Lord and life peer for services rendered rather than face anything close to a reprimand for “exceeding the boundaries of his job description” as one would have expected.
The doubling down of those deep state operatives like Comey, Brennan and Clapper who after having been caught artificially pushing a contrived lie to de-legitimize the 2016 elections under RussiaGate, would become ever more crazed and loud in their advocacy of Trump’s allegiance to the Kremlin.
But this is an old formula that wasn’t invented with Trump. Caught laundering drug money HSBC? No worries. Pay a few dollars in fines, wait a bit, then do it again, but go bigger. Caught orchestrating a color revolution in Georgia? No problem. Just do another one in Ukraine. What happens when your Georgian color revolutionary puppet starts a war with Russia and has to flee his own nation to avoid imprisonment for corruption? Give him Ukrainian citizenship and install him as Governor of the Nazi-infested province of Odessa.
Back to the Soros-Brown Lovefest
Despite these truths, I must admit that the December 4 announcement of Lord Malloch Brown’s rise to the Presidency of Soros’ Open Society Foundations did surprise me.
Knowing that Dominion Voting systems shared its office space with Soros’ Tides Foundation in Toronto Canada was pretty bad. Knowing that Dominion executive Eric Koomer was caught on Soros-connected Antifa organizing zoom calls publicly announcing that he had ensured that Trump would not win was also bad. Seeing the integration of Dominion’s voting systems with a Soros operation known as the Clinton Foundation Delian Project didn’t look good.
When it came to Soros/Malloch Brown characters active in Biden’s aspiring administration, we find the likes of Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Peter Neffenger have found themselves enmeshed in the current coup operation serving as U.S. head of Smartmatic. Other Soros-Malloch Brown connected operatives include International Crisis Group member Jake Sullivan as Biden’s pick for National Security Advisor, Neera Tanden (head of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress) who will head the White House Office of Management and Budget, and lest we forget Anthony Blinken – longtime friend of International Crisis Group President Robert Malley and son of Soros confidante Donald Blinken (whose Donald and Vera Blinken Open Society Archive in Hungary should serve as a constant reminder.)
Yet despite their decades of collaboration and devotion to the cause of destroying sovereign nation states as I outlined in my previous report, Soros and Malloch Brown didn’t make any effort to separate themselves amidst the current surge of U.S. color revolution controversies but have instead doubled down dramatically.
Announcing the transfer of power from Open Society President Patrick Gaspard to Brown, the Open Society website proclaimed:
“Patrick Gaspard has announced his decision to step down as president at the end of the year. During his three-year tenure, he confronted significant threats to open societies around the globe, including the rise of authoritarian regimes and the spread of the COVID-19 virus worldwide. Under his capable leadership, the Open Society Foundations have emerged stronger than ever.
Succeeding him as president will be Mark Malloch-Brown, the former UN deputy secretary‐general and UK minister, who currently serves on the Foundations’ Global Board. Malloch-Brown will take over effective January 1.”
Soros commented on Lord Malloch Brown’s presidency saying: “Mark is deeply familiar with Open Society’s work and shares my vision of a political philanthropy that is focused and prepared for the future.”
What these Globalists Fear
The real threats to their joint vision for an “open society” (code for “technocratic post-nation state world order run by a Malthusian master class”) were enumerated on multiple occasions by both Lord Malloch Brown and Soros. Since the current battle across the globe between Great Reset oligarchs and patriots has coincided with a spike in misinformation and psy ops which have attempted to pin the USA into a war posture with China, it is a good moment to be reminded of what those fears are.
In his June 2020 speech promoting world government, Lord Brown stated: “In the wider world a more authoritarian form of government is the new majority. It is not China alone. This “new majority” embraces leaders who come to power by the ballot box and those who didn’t, but who all share a preference for a nationalist foreign policy, the weakening of domestic institutions and the rule of law”.
At another event a few months later, Lord Malloch Brown warned that the United Nations had been infiltrated by authoritarian nation states like Russia, and China. His solution? Create new transnational operations which “bypass the UN security council”. Apparently, only open society-friendly NGOs are enlightened enough to dictate global policy.
Outlining his understanding of the two greatest threats to “open society”, George Soros had targeted two villains in his January 23, 2020 Davos speech: #1) Xi Jinping’s China and #2: Donald Trump’s USA.
At this speech, Soros stated: “regrettably, President Trump seems to be following a different course: Make concessions to China and declare victory while renewing his attacks on U.S. allies. This is liable to undermine the U.S. policy objective of curbing China’s abuses and excesses.”
At the time Soros spoke, the U.S.-China trade deal had begun its first phase which aimed at ensuring China’s purchase of $200-$300 billion of U.S. manufactured goods. During these hopeful days of collaboration, President Trump understood much better than he does now that 10+ months of COVID insanity and anti-China psy war have flooded his support base, that the ultimate recovery of U.S. manufacturing was contingent upon good relations with China. Trump’s early words of support of Xi Jinping when COVID had newly emerged onto the scene calling the Chinese leader “my friend”, were truly prospects which scared the hell out of Soros, Malloch Brown (not to mention Soros’ right wing doppelganger Steve Bannon who has been set up as a false opposition over the past few years.)
USA-China Synergy is the greatest threat to a Bankers’ Dictatorship
The fact is that the vast markets being created by China’s Belt and Road Initiative provide important zones of demand for U.S. production and vital energy for long term big thinking unseen in the USA since the days of John F. Kennedy. China’s leadership in the multipolar alliance alongside Russia has not only created a foundation of serious resistance to the unipolar agenda, but has also re-awoken for the first time in decades, the multipolar foreign policy traditions that were once emblematic of the USA which I’ve written extensively about here and here and here and here.
This obvious synergy between the two “authoritarian” states of Xi’s China and Trump’s USA was, and continues to be, the greatest fear of those technocrats wishing to castrate nation states on the alter of green decarbonization schemes, world government and never-ending asymmetric wars to ensure that such inter-civilizational cooperative projects as the New Silk Road, be sabotaged under “divide and conquer” strategies. Sure these technocrats sometimes speak well of China, but I assure you that the only thing they admire are China’s centralized controls and surveillance infrastructure which they would love to have applied to control those democratically-minded nations of the west that they seek to dominate. Everything that China does that relates to poverty reduction, large scale infrastructure development, promotion of full spectrum economics abroad, win-win diplomacy, sovereign banking controls, mass education, and frontier creative leaps in science are considered deplorable and only worth destroying.
This is what makes the collapse of U.S. patriotic strategic thinking under an “anti-China” worldview so tragic and dangerous. For all of their courageous work exposing the election fraud and the ongoing 4 year coup attempt of Russia Gate, U.S. patriots like Sydney Powell, Michael Flynn and even Trump himself have demonstrated a tendency to fall for lines of simplistic reasoning that attempt to deflect the causal hand of British intelligence, and instead blame a combined assortment of secondary/tertiary reactive players like Iran and China as the ultimate villains of the story.
Perhaps if people would think a little more seriously about the CIA’s creation and protection of such Asian-scientology outfits like Falun Gong whose U.S.-based leader believes he is a messiah and which controls Epoch Times then they would be a little more weary about accepting every piece of information being slipping into their minds like mental trojan horses.
Perhaps these patriots would also recognize that Falun Gong’s expulsion from China in 1997 was due more to the outfit’s role in attempting to lead a color revolution akin to the Russian White Revolution of 2010 and not due to the CPC’s fear of the spread of “compassion, benevolence and kindness”. They might also realize that Soros/CIA Freedom House’s support for Falun Gong dovetails Bannon’s own collaboration with the same organization bringing both apparent “enemies” into direct synergy. Bannon’s calls for “uniting the global Christian right” under his Dignitas Humanitae Institute (connected to the highest echelons of the European black nobility) under a unified front to prepare for war with Chinese civilization and Islam is just a re-packaging of the neocon clash of civilizations doctrine that has played off of Soros’ anti-human brand of globalism for decades.
What is the carry away lesson from all of this?
Love your nation, and if you are American then defend the presidency from the likes of creeps like Soros, Mark Malloch Brown and Bannon. But keep in mind that the causal hand behind the subversion of the republic (or whatever nation state you might live in) is the same hand which desperately seeks to destroy China, and this same hand can only be chopped off once patriotic Americans and patriotic Chinese begin to work together.
There is no ‘Russian secret war’ on the US, but WaPo fantasy risks Biden starting a very real one
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | December 12, 2020
In a normal world, the Washington Post claiming the existence of a Russian ‘secret war’ against the US based on far-fetched conjecture and debunked conspiracy theories would be a laughing matter. We don’t live in such a world.
Democrat Joe Biden, anointed by the US mainstream media and Silicon Valley as the next president, “must call out Putin’s secret war against the United States” when he assumes office, the Post’s editorial board argued this week.
But this “secret war” exists only in their feverish imagination. Each and every one of the things they list as examples of it consists of assertions based on insinuation at best, or has otherwise been debunked as outright fake news.
Exhibit A is the “mysterious attacks” that supposedly “targeted” US diplomats and spies in Cuba, China, Australia and Taiwan. This ‘Havana Syndrome’ was blamed on Russia last week in a coordinated media campaign, but the “scientific” paper it was based on carefully avoids actual attribution, saying only that the vague symptoms were “consistent” with a posited microwave weapon.
This is an evolution of the original story, which claimed that Russia had used “sonic weapons,” not microwave ones. Even the New York Times later admitted that the headaches, sleep deprivation and other problems were more likely caused by the loud chirping of Cuban crickets.
Exhibit B is another doozy, the infamous “Russian bounties” story. The New York Times claimed in June that some money captured from local mobsters in Afghanistan was somehow proof that Russia was paying the Taliban to kill US soldiers – again, not on the basis of actual evidence, but on conjecture that this was “consistent” with what the CIA and US military said were Russian objectives.
Thing is, neither the US intelligence community nor the Pentagon were ever able to confirm the story, having investigated it for months. It just so happened that it was brought up just as the DC establishment sought to torpedo President Donald Trump’s plan to pull out of Afghanistan and end the 20-year war that has long since forgotten its purpose.
Exhibit C is the “looting of valuable hacking tools” from the cybersecurity firm FireEye, announced earlier this week. FireEye itself never named the culprit, with its CEO Kevin Mandia only saying it was “consistent with a nation-state cyber-espionage effort.”
That didn’t stop the Post from claiming that “spies with Russia’s foreign intelligence service” are “believed” to have hacked FireEye, citing “people familiar with the matter.” Well there you go, anonymous and unverifiable sources asserted it, therefore it must be true!
Last but not least, Exhibit D is the assertion that the “Democratic National Committee’s computers were raided by Russian military intelligence to disrupt the 2016 election.” That is another assertion, based on allegations listed in indictments by special counsel Robert Mueller. As a federal judge helpfully reminded Mueller in another ‘Russiagate’ case, which the government later dropped, allegations made in indictments aren’t statements of fact.
If the phrase “consistent with” jumps out at you here, that’s no accident. Notice there is no actual evidence offered for any of these claims, only an insinuation that these alleged attacks would be “consistent” with what the US spies, anonymous sources and mainstream media think might be Russian objectives.
That’s exactly the claim made by the infamous January 2017 “intelligence community assessment,” which the media falsely attributed to “17 intelligence agencies” instead of a hand-picked team involved in spying on the Trump campaign at the time.
Keep in mind that these are the same spies and media that never saw the demise of the Soviet Union coming, and have been predicting Russia’s impending collapse any day now – for the past 20 years. So much for their actual knowledge of Russian goals or thinking.
Speaking of ‘Russiagate,’ the Post has been on the leading edge of that conspiracy theory from the start. It won Pulitzers for pushing it on the American public. It also played a key role in smearing Trump’s first national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, so he would be fired – and later cheered his railroading by Mueller. At least they’re consistent, so to speak.
Now, the Post editors may be privileged people, living comfortably off of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon fortune even as their country collapses under pandemic lockdowns. However, it would be a mistake to write off this editorial as a mere product of their vivid and feverish imaginations. After four years of Russiagate hysteria that even the Trump administration has internalized, this kind of rhetoric is actually dangerous.
That’s because the Post is literally in bed with what Trump called the Washington “swamp,” the entrenched US political establishment. What they print is what that establishment thinks and wants Americans to believe. With Joe Biden in the White House, the objectives of that establishment and the official US government would be, to use their own phrase, consistent.
Which is why the Post’s “secret war” fantasy is, shall we say, highly likely to become an actual shooting war with Moscow. As the US and Russia have enough nuclear weapons between themselves to destroy the world several times over, that can’t possibly be good for Amazon’s bottom line. Someone ought to tell Bezos.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
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Book Review
Former Insiders Criticize Iran Policy as U.S. Hegemony
By GARETH PORTER | CounterPunch | February 27, 2013
“Going to Tehran” arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far.
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett tackle not only U.S. policy toward Iran but the broader context of Middle East policy with a systematic analytical perspective informed by personal experience, as well as very extensive documentation.
More importantly, however, their exposé required a degree of courage that may be unparalleled in the writing of former U.S. national security officials about issues on which they worked. They have chosen not just to criticise U.S. policy toward Iran but to analyse that policy as a problem of U.S. hegemony. … continue
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- Devastating Assessment Of Comirnaty Vaccine By Former Senior Pfizer Europe Toxicologist
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- Energy Expert: Germany’s Nuclear Phaseout Was A “500 Billion Euro Mistake”
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