The Vault 7 exposé by WikiLeaks neglected to mention the most important part of the disclosure. Sure, the CIA has all these tools available. Yes, they are used on the public. The important part is; it’s not the CIA that’s using them. That’s the part that needs to frighten you.
The CIA, by the definition of its mission, cannot use the tools in Vault 7, and definitely not on Americans. All the tools are unclassified, open-source, and can be used by anyone. It makes them not exactly usable for secret agent work. That’s what makes it impossible for them to use Vault 7 tools directly. Because of the possible exposure for the agency, use of the tools was farmed out.
Instead, they are there for subcontractors to use. Are you worried about your TV watching you? Has your car developed the habit of starting itself in the morning?
If these tools were solely in the hands of a US agency, you would be much safer. The agencies have limits on what they can do and agencies have oversight providing protections.
Instead, intelligence and counterterrorism tools are in the hands of people that make most of their money pushing political agendas forward. And there is no oversight for what they are doing with the tools.
In March 2015, I started writing about private NSA guns for hire. These hired guns work in the revolving door between government Intel and counterterrorism and private intel and counterterrorism. What it showed was the same people that worked for US agencies and trained them were using the same tools and methods on Americans that they used for terrorist hunting. And they brag about it in social media.
The same people that take counterterrorism measures against Al Qaeda, are free to use those tools on you. According to CNN, Aaron Weisburd models his methods on the no-holds-barred Al Qaeda model.
sources close to U.S. intelligence as saying that “hackers knocked out Al Qaeda’s online means of communication, thus preventing them from posting anything to commemorate 911 anniversary.” The paper also said Western intelligence suspects two hackers were responsible: Aaron Weisburd from Internet Haganah and Rusty Shackleford from the web group My Pet Jawa.”
As much as 80 percent of the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) budget is privatized, demonstrating the merger between Washington and corporate organizations, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Tuesday.”
In May 2015, The Nation published an article that is a must read to grasp how dangerous this has become. I’ve written intensively on how these tools are used to create news and policy from a ground and company level for NGO’s and lobbyists. This article ratchets it up by looking at the policy makers and former agency heads that go into the private Intel and policy crafting business for hire.
According to The Nation :
These are the people — often referred to as “intelligence professionals” — who do the actual analytical and targeting work of the NSA and other agencies in America’s secret government. Over the last 15 years, thousands of former high-ranking intelligence officials and operatives have left their government posts and taken up senior positions at military contractors, consultancies, law firms, and private-equity firms. In their new jobs, they replicate what they did in government—often for the same agencies they left. But this time, their mission is strictly for-profit.”
What does this have to do with overhauling the ODNI and 17 Intel agencies? Everything. From oversight to policy, the level of non-partisan professionalism needed to conduct unbiased intelligence work is no longer there. The Vault 7 leak could well be an inside attempt to address these issues.
“In the intelligence community in the United States, there are certain disgruntled individuals [concerned] about the way operations are being run, and it’s obvious that material has come out that was felt by some of these individuals needed to be discussed,” Kampmark explained.”
The ODNI and its agencies descent into shambles have been three presidencies in the making. Why a shambles? When intelligence is based on political agendas, rumor, or speculation instead of facts, it’s in trouble. All of it was done in the name of getting faster intelligence and making actionable Intel available to members of Congress that had no business getting involved with classified, need to know basis intelligence.
The second part of this article will address how much effect these intel releases have on breaking story news over the years.
Many of the Intel experts hired as contractors are not Intel experts. As you’ll soon see, a housecleaning at the agency level and contractors is both unavoidable and necessary.
I asked Michael Jasinski, Assistant Professor Department of Political Science University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh about this. Professor Jasinski had oversight over researchers that were later hired by US Intel agencies and provided evaluations of them prior to their employment.
His comments show why a radical cleanup in both intel and counter-terrorism needs to happen. With the following statement he also added that their obvious patriotic feelings were real, but:
“Considering how the intelligence community is depicted in the media or in the movies (and clearly CIA “outreach” plays a role here), you’d think Jedi Knights. The Justice League. Gandalf. But if you ever had personal contact with the “three-letter agencies” for any period of time, you’d think different.
My most recent experience with the “intelligence” community was at MIIS, post-9/11 when the agencies were coming there to hire, and they were hiring big. They hired many of my research assistants–I was doing what might be termed “open-source intelligence” on WMD proliferation–and in the process, they’d ask me, their immediate supervisor, for my opinion.
So I’d tell them point-blank: can’t read, can’t write, can’t analyze. I don’t care what their CV says, the only language they can function in at any level is English. No matter, they’d get hired anyway. Drug convictions? No matter, they’d get hired anyway (at least at the time, the CIA would hire you if you didn’t have any drug convictions within the last 3 years). Scary political views they wore on their sleeve? No matter, they’d get hired anyway. All of my good assistants went to work for the UN, IAEA, major NGOs. The dregs went to “intelligence.”
So now when I see a) the “Russian interference” stories and b) the inability to safeguard, and presumably use responsibly, your own cyber-warfare arsenal, I can’t say I’m exactly surprised. But there are no shortcuts in this kind of work. If you rapidly expand at the cost of dramatically lowering standards, you (and the country) are going to pay a price. We’re paying it right now…”
One thing all these people have in common is that none of them have a background in intelligence or antiterrorism. In the years before and after 9/11, these concerned citizens took to the web and started pioneering a new form of intelligence called OSINT (Open Source Intelligence). This would later provide the basis for the establishment of the NSA and become the backbone of US intelligence gathering.
All the intelligence gathering agencies rejected it at first because it relied on social media. At best this intelligence can only be looked at as unsubstantiated or rumor level information. While it’s OK for pointing to a potential problem, it’s limitations are that it provides unproven and possibly compromised and tainted information. The CIA was focused on HUMINT (Human Intel, using human agents or trusted sources) and SIGINT(Signals Intel/ communications).
These Open Source Intel pioneers started gaining ground by emailing community leaders and US Congressmen. They pushed OSINT to the forefront of US intelligence by sending it to anyone they thought would listen and forward their Intel to the US government. At first, they worked on the War on Terror.
Along the way, they collected letters of recommendation which they flashed around to the next prospective clients in government, Intel agencies, military, and lobbyists. This is important because letters of recommendation from people not in the Intel business became the basis for this new internet, Google search based, cottage industry.
Some of them work directly with Israeli intelligence. Most of these pioneers found ready help by sending their Intel to Israeli embassies that sent the info to US government agencies. At the same time, with the help of the connections they were making, they published news stories in major publications before US agencies had time to digest the information that they received. This forced the US government to react to their online Google-driven research.
Because it was Open Source Intel, these pioneers figured out quickly that they could send or sell the information BEFORE it was reviewed by an agency and classified. All Intel the CIA receives is given a classified rating whether it is open source or not. This one point increased the status of the practitioners.
Congressmen, Governors, and news outlets that were interested started getting the same “Intel” the CIA was. It also became clear quickly that the new Intel could be framed on whatever bias you chose. This meant it could be used to create policy.
Lobbyists and Congress quickly figured out that by using these sources, they could push pet or paid foreign policy forward. Because it was a private effort, OSINT operators got paid to deliver Intel for groups looking for specific insights. For instance, during the Gulf War, they searched for WMD and Al Qaeda connections.
From the mid-1990’s this became a boom industry thanks to pioneers Steve Emerson and Rita Katz. Emerson’s big break came with CNN after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. He was sure Islamists were behind it. Being wrong didn’t slow him down.
Before 9/11, Emerson and Katz open source Intel was being spread far and wide and thanks to personal networking efforts it made, then president Bush’s daily briefings about Al Qaeda. Emerson and Katz provided erroneous open source Intel to support Ahmed Chalabi’s drive for invading Iraq. This was personal to Katz and Intel agencies noted that most of her Intel is one-sided and politically charged.
Katz made it a habit of bombarding agencies and media with new social media findings that came so fast news cycles couldn’t keep up with it. To ignore her meant you could be scooped by another news agency. To publish it meant that it was unsubstantiated information.
For Katz, this came to a head in 2007 when she posted an Osama bin Laden interview online before Al Qaeda had a chance to. How many conclusions does this point to? Al Qaeda got the video from Katz.
A similar event occurred Friday when another group beat al-Qaeda by nearly a full day with the release of the first video images of bin Laden to appear publicly since 2004. That group, the SITE Institute, provided the tape to government agencies and news organizations at a time when many well-known jihadist Web sites had been shut down in a powerful cyber attack by unknown hackers.”
According to the Newsweek article “How Richard Clarke Outsourced Terrorist Intel,” both Emerson and Katz became the go-to companies for OSINT. US intelligence had no experience with it until this period. And US intel and law enforcement didn’t want any.
Emerson and Katz furnished Clarke and his staff with the names of Islamic radical Web sites, the identities of possible terrorist front groups and the phone numbers and addresses of possible terror suspects–data they were unable to get from elsewhere in the government.
This private pipeline of information–which began under President Clinton and continued under Bush even after September 11–irritated top officials at FBI headquarters, especially when much of the private research bore fruit and was later used to help develop a U.S. government list of banned organizations whose assets were frozen by the Treasury Department.”
After the Patriot Act, it was these two in particular and contractors like them that caused the “no-fly” lists to fill out so quickly. The search for terrorists had begun and it looks like it was paid on a piece-work basis. The more potential terrorists there were the more money in government contracts that could be had.
Until this point, Emerson and Katz research was funded by unnamed wealthy donors and foundations who had an interest in finding Islamic terrorists operating in the US online. In his book “Against All Enemies” Clarke writes “Within days” of his first request in late 1999, Emerson provided him “with a long list of Web sites sitting on servers in the United States.” Clarke then passed along the list to the Justice Department and FBI. But officials there balked at using it and complained at the time about “how difficult it was to prosecute ‘free speech’ cases.”
While all of this sounds good and noble, the reality was and is that most of the targeted websites were American citizens expressing free speech. The only qualification to get on their list for a news site or a website was to print anti-Zionist articles, pro-Palestinian articles, or write something against the policies their donors or lobbyist bosses were against. When the government refused to act, OSINT pioneers took it upon themselves to shut down, hack, makeup, and plant evidence on websites to try to get convictions.
Big media and the agencies themselves did their job letting the public know what was going on. Because no one understood the technology and therefore didn’t care about this, the problem grew to where it is today. As early as 2003 in the Chicago Tribune, the FBI gave warnings like this one about a particular website it was asked to investigate, “The site is not illegal in any way [nor does it condone] illegal activity,” said FBI spokesman Frank Bochte in Chicago. “We cannot be the Orwellian thought police. If it is mere words and nothing beyond that, there’s nothing we can do.”
The proof terrorist hunter Aaron Weisburd offered was simple. “It talks about the “Zionist” rope over American leaders and lists 45 Jews in top positions of U.S. government. A photo gallery features the burning of the American flag, and one section is called “Know Your Enemy.”
In 2005, the Washington Postinterviewed Weisburd and he unabashedly states his group uses the same tactics as Al Qaeda. He goes on to say that not everything they do is legal. According to his victims, he used the tools, access, and criminal activity to destroy their lives. They had nothing to do with the war on terror. They wrote human rights articles.
The Guardian made the point in November 2014 saying:
“Our choice isn’t between a world where either the good guys spy or the bad guys spy. It’s a choice of everybody gets to spy or nobody gets to spy.”
The privatized NSA makes its living off building hate. They are hired to drive headlines and policy. A longtime partner of Rita Katz and Aaron Weisburd drove these headlines in the UK.
‘Terror expert warns of ‘new 9/11’’, The Express, 1 January 2009; ‘Attack on US ‘soon’’, The Sun, 1 January 2009, ‘HATE HIT LIST’, The Sun, 7 January 2009
In her 2003 book “The Terrorist Hunter,” Rita Katz went as far as to say “the F.B.I., didn’t “possess one-thousandth of my knowledge on the relevant issues.”
Through agency overhaul in 2004, Congress set the stage and legislated the method that agencies and media warned would result in politically motivated, goal oriented reports loosely defined as intelligence. All of it affects policy today because a lot of it is designed to.
With over 20 years of experience, Steve Emerson must deliver crazy good OSINT intel to the US government. Just how good is the god-father of US government OSINT intel?
Unfortunately, this isn’t a joke. These same experts taught NATO, the FBI, CIA, NSA, and related agencies their expertise in the business through 6-week courses and seminars. They also testify as expert witnesses for Congress and supply an endless stream of Intel built on the policies their clients or prejudice dictates. Today’s DNI is filled with people that learned his methods.
How serious are they taken? The Information Operations Newsletter Vol. 12, no. 06 (April 2012) Compiled by: Mr. Jeff Harley, US Army Space and Missile Defense Command Army Forces Strategic Command G39, Information Operations Division quotes the above-listed OSINT pioneers as the experts to listen to.
Throughout 2015 and 2016, I followed a team of these OSINT pioneers setting up to attack people in the USA using these technologies. Because no one had ever cared before, they were very open about what they were doing in social media if you knew where to look. They geo-located victims, collected information, and added hackers in the group to attack American news websites.
I followed this group as they destroyed the income of news websites and started to destroy the reputations of owners and journalists. After documenting enough of the facts, I tried to contact the concerned parties directly and indirectly. I wrote a couple articles describing how it was happening and even quoted the group doing it describing what they were setting up for. This even included screen shots.
Why would they go as far as geo-location? Vault 7 makes that clear. The pioneer in this area also helped set up the Peacemaker website for Ukraine. This site provides kill lists with all the information known or needed to find someone. Within a month of my first article about Peacemaker in March 2015, the first victim was murdered.
It raises some serious questions about what is occurring in 2017. When it’s clear the people using Vault 7 tools don’t think of you as anything more than an enemy in a “Call of Duty” video game and they get paid for results, it’s time to question the legality.
When they do it for foreign governments, it’s time to bring up treason. When they turn around, work for government and then put the same people and news site on lists; Are they working for their private clients or for the US government? If you disagree with their employers’ politics, they get paid to destroy your life. They are a privatized NSA attacking you.
Part 2 of this article will show the second fork using these tools took. Understanding who is behind the stories about Russian election influence, hacking, and even the MH-17 disaster in 2014, and why they did it is an eye opener.
This dissects fake news and shows how prominent fabricated intelligence is in mainstream media. The article shows the methodology and the technicians that ignited and pushed the biggest controversies of the past few years.
These are the tools and these are the players that built the election interference and Russian hacking story. The 17 Intel agencies need a ground up rebuild.
George Eliason is an American journalist that lives and works in Donbass. He has been interviewed by and provided analysis for RT, the BBC, and Press-TV.
Ever heard of a roundabout-dog? They are artificial dogs which started appearing in roundabouts in Sweden last year. Most likely meant as a joke, a Swedish cartoonist figured this phenomenon could be used in a funny way to provoke Muslims anger. The Swedish artist Lars Vilks made three silly drawings portraying a dog standing in a roundabout, with Prophet Muhammad’s head. The political implications aside, the quality of his work is-to say the least-far below even mediocre. Three art galleries decided not to exhibit these drawings, which is perfectly understandable. Nor do they have any obligation to do so, especially when the art is of poor quality and only meant to insult. Vilks has openly admitted this:
“Of course it was a provocation and an insult to the Muslims. But it was an empty provocation. I am not promoting any idea such as kicking all the Muslims out of Sweden.” Getting attention was also a part of it: “All artists gun for attention, and there is jealousy among those in the business of attracting much attention,” he asserted.
It could have ended there. An obnoxious, obscure artist making silly drawings of Prophet Muhammad–who cares? But this was just the beginning. A Swedish newspaper, Nerikes Allehanda, published Vilks’s drawings this August, describing the art galleries’ decision not to exhibit the drawings as “unacceptable self-censorship,” saying it must be permissible to ridicule the symbols of another religion. A staff writer at the paper compared it to Monty Python’s film Life of Brian:
In Norway, Life of Brian was banned, in reference to the law against blasphemy. In the United States voices were raised to have it banned. John Cleese pointed out that God could certainly take care of himself. I am myself an active Christian and I think Life of Brian is an extremely funny movie.
Fine. But what he fails to see is that Life of Brian was made by people of Christian origin, while this is an attack by a Christian on Islam. Also, while Life of Brian was a comedy, these drawings had no other purpose than to insult and provoke. Not exactly comparable.
And it didn’t take long before Muslims raised voices to protest the publication. Not only in Sweden; 200 people went to the streets in Pakistan, burning a doll representing the Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt and the Swedish flag (which is yellow and blue, not yellow and green as the demonstrations thought). Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that the “Zionists,” who (unlike Jews) “only pretend to believe in religion,” were behind the publication. Protestors also hit Swedish streets, though peacefully.
Instead of discussing the issues as to why many Muslims became upset-always seeing Islam slandered, exposed to threats, and having their Mosques vandalised-the affair was made into a matter of freedom of speech. Journalists, commentators, politicians and others all defended the publication in the name of freedom of speech. Truth is, it was never under threat; only a very low number among the opponents of publishing the drawings said this should be criminalised.
One of them, the Egyptian Ambassador Samah Mohamed Sotouhi, declared that “We must try to bring about a change in the law. The Muslims need legal protection against the defamation of the Prophet Muhammad, similar to [the protection] that Jews and homosexuals enjoy.” But except for some efforts made by Muslim countries, no politician or journalist spoke out in favour of the state outlawing such a practise, including the vast majority of those objecting to the publication. (It is interesting to notice that the very same people, who care so much for freedom of speech when defamation of Muslims is the case, had nothing to say when a Swedish computer teacher, Jan Bernhoff, was sacked from his job for attending the holocaust conference in Iran. Bernhoff, not Vilks, was the one who needed their support.)
The publication brought the affair to a whole new level. Two Swedish-Muslim organisations made an effort to cool things down by trying to engage in a dialogue with Vilks (after all, they are the ones who will suffer in the end). One of the two organisations even wanted to exhibit the drawings in order to be able to have a real debate on the issue. But the project came to an end when Vilks, having so far been criticised only for defaming Muslim symbols, posted another silly drawing on his blog, this time a pathetic portrait of a so-called Jew-sow. Faced with Vilks’s newest creation, representatives of the two Muslim organisations, Mohamed Omar and Hooman Anvari, decided a dialogue with Lars Vilks was simply no longer possible. They wrote:
[With] Vilks now publishing an explicitly and undoubtedly anti-Semitic scurrilous portrait (signed as a “Jew-sow” by the artist himself), the discussion has now entered a different phase. From a purely ethical one to one of jurisprudence.
In other words, they cut it short not because of his anti-Muslim work but because of his anti-Semitic drawing. It may seem odd, but reflects the current sentiment in the Western world: insulting Muslims is a matter of freedom of speech, while defamation of Jewish symbols is never tolerated.
As the days went by and everything was petering out, a death-threat was pronounced against Lars Vilks which quickly made things more tense. Things like these happen all the time, many artists receive threats. The difference was the sender; a supposed al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, generously promised $100,000 to whoever kills Lars Vilks ($150,000 if he is “butchered as a lamb”). The editor of the newspaper wasn’t worth as much–only $50,000. However, all we know for sure about al-Baghdadi is that there are different perceptions of who he is. Some sources claim he was a leading al-Qaeda fighter killed in May this year-three months before the publication!-while others say it’s just a name used by a rebel group in Iraq. Hence, should anyone kill Vilks or the editor, it might be hard to claim the reward. But the death-threat again Vilks was taken seriously and he was given police-protection.
A few days after the pronounced death-threats, a list of over 100 Swedish companies was published which Islamists say should be punished just for being of the same nationality as Vilks. “Take revenge,” these fanatics urged. However, when journalists rang some of these companies for a comment, they were surprised. “We have received no indications of any threat,” a spokesperson of one of the companies said. In fact, it turns out, these companies haven’t received any direct threats. The list of companies, as well as the death-threats against Vilks and the editor, all originate from one source: The Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Institute. Founded in 2002 by Rita Katz and Josh Devon, SITE is a Zionist propaganda institute which, among other things, offers its “Monitoring Service, which provides numerous daily translations of terrorist propaganda and multimedia from primary source terrorist websites.” Katz and Devon claims for instance that Yahoo! has become one of al-Qaeda’s most significant ideological bases of operation. Utilizing several facets of Yahoo!’s service, including chat functions, e-mail, and most importantly, Yahoo! Groups, al-Qaeda and its supporters have inserted themselves like a cancer into a company that screams, “American pop culture,” and made it as much their own as a training camp in Khost [in Afghanistan].
When Osama Bin Laden and his gang are not using Yahoo!’s chat service, however, they spend their time surfing more protected sites. SITE brags on its first-page as being described in the following way by an author:
“By monitoring terrorist and extremist websites and penetrating password-protected al-Qaeda linked sites, SITE provides a state-of-the-art intelligence service to both practitioners and analysts to understand the adversary.”
It makes you wonder how the SITE Institute, with a small staff of only two people (at least no other is mentioned) can find its way into “password-protected al-Qaeda linked sites” which, apparently, the FBI and the CIA, with all its resources, seem to be incapable of finding and infiltrating. What is even more noteworthy is that SITE, in its own words, works regularly with and provides important and often unique information to journalists, law firms pursuing civil litigation, major corporations, law enforcement, U.S. Congress, and numerous federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Treasury Department, Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), the FBI, Customs, and the Department of Justice.
As can be expected of an institute of this kind, there is a Zionist connection. And that is co-founder Rita Katz, who was born to a wealth Jewish family in 1963 in Basra, Iraq. When she was 6-years-old her father was hanged on the charge of spying for Israel. Two years later the family emigrated to Israel, where she stayed until the mid-90s, when she left for the US with her husband. In an interview with The Jewish Journal it is revealed Katz also worked on the case against the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), which is on trial accused of channelling money to Hamas.
Katz answered an ad and was hired by a Middle Eastern research institute. (Because of her lawsuit, she doesn’t want to reveal the institute’s name.)
On her first day on the job – much of her work entailed “administrative stuff and copying,” her new boss had told her – she started reading documents in English and Arabic about the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF).
“I saw differences in the translations,” Katz recalled. “The Arabic list was longer, and I recognized that some organizations mentioned in Arabic and not in English were Hamas front organizations.”
That realization propelled her to start doing research on that group, collecting Arabic documents and eventually going undercover.
Her work, through her SITE Institute, which is funded by various federal agencies and private groups needing to know about radical Muslim groups operating in the United States, has led to closures of organizations, deportations and ongoing investigations. She also has provided the media with information.
This is very interesting, considering the evidence used against the HLF is highly questioned. In an article published in the LA Times on the 25th of February, reproduced by Information Clearing House, staff writer Greg Krikorian points to discrepancies in the proof put forward against the HLF. Krikorian wrote:
Additional anti-Semitic comments the FBI summary attributed to Baker or Ghassan Elashi, Holy Land’s former board chairman, included:
* “Their [Jews’] only purpose here in the U.S. is to purchase as many politicians as possible and to warp the way the American Christians feel and think not just about the Christian religion but mainly about the Palestinian people and to rob as much money as possible from American taxpayers for the illegitimate excuse of protecting and preserving the chosen people of God.”
* “Even Jesus Christ had called the Jews and their high priests the sons of snakes and scorpions.”
* “I am confident that in the end justice, and not the Jews, will prevail. I believe that there is still justice in America.”
None of those quotes was contained in a 13-page transcript of the conversation, defense lawyers said in their motion to expand access to classified evidence. ()
Because the court records are heavily redacted, it could not be determined who provided the summaries of the FBI wiretaps.
Other alleged discrepancies also have dogged the case. Holy Land lawyers challenged the accuracy of an FBI memo, for example, that quoted a foundation office manager as telling Israeli authorities that charitable funds were “channeled to Hamas.”
But defense lawyers told the court the translation from Arabic to Hebrew to English distorted the official’s original statement, and that he should have been quoted as saying, “We have no connection to Hamas.”
A former U.S. consul-general in Jerusalem, Edward Abingdon, when asked if he found the information Israel provided reliable, answered with a straightforward “No.” He added, “I feel the Israelis have an agenda … they provide selective information to try to influence US thinking.”
Indeed, the trial against the HLF is just one example of how Israelis are the ones persecuting Muslim organisations in America. As made clear in the above-quoted sentence, the translation was made “from Arabic to Hebrew to English.” The Zionists have the upper hand, and going to the bottom with cases like this is close to impossible. They provide the evidence, and not much can be done to prove them wrong. The veracity in the accusations made by propaganda institutes of SITE’s ilk should be strongly questioned. As for the threats against the Swedish cartoonist, editor and the 100 Swedish companies, all we can know for sure is that no attack has yet taken place.
Two months after the publication, the matter has gotten cold. But it is clear that for the first time, through a Zionist institution in America, supposed death-threats by al-Qaeda found their way to a country once known for its peaceful attitude and solidarity with the oppressed, creating fear of Muslim fundamentalism which is now said to live in our midst. Clear also is that sending soldiers to Afghanistan and being silent as neoconservatives and Zionists are creating havoc in the Middle East is not the road to saving our good reputation.
KRISTOFFER LARSSON is a Swedish theology student occasionally commenting on political issues. He works with the Bethlehem-based International Middle East Media Center and is a Director of Deir Yassin Remembered. He appreciates constructive feedback: kristoffer.larsson@sobernet.nu
How is it possible that, in a matter of weeks, an obscure gang of thugs were able to seize control of a large swath of Syria, start an oil-export business while never coming under a credible threat by its alleged NATO enemies? There’s just one way.
Before we understand what is happening – and alas, not happening – in Syria a reality check is needed: The date is August 30, 2013 and British PM David Cameron has just suffered a historic loss in the House of Commons, which voted against the UK joining the US military in yet another Middle East misadventure, this time in Syria.
This unexpected reversal of fortune for NATO represented a humiliating blow to Washington’s Nobel-winning warlord, Barack Obama, who already has Libya’s head mounted above the executive fireplace.
But Cameron’s unexpected defeat cooled America’s jet engines, and Obama was forced to appear on television, telling the American people in a tear-jerking performance worthy of an Academy Award: “I have a deeply held preference for peaceful solutions.” Except, of course, when he is not attacking sovereign states, like Libya, and rudely crashing wedding parties with uninvited drone strikes.
Now this was right around the time that Russia – which wisely refused to get bogged down in the Ukrainian morass, thus giving NATO free play in the Middle East – was starting to make a real nuisance of itself as far as Washington was concerned.
Moscow, thanks to an alleged off-the-cuff remark by US Secretary of State John Kerry, managed to get the NATO dogs of war back on the leash as Putin convinced Syrian President Bashar Assad to surrender his chemical weapons to the United Nations.
As thanks for the commendable act of denying NATO yet another serial murder in broad daylight, Putin was recklessly vilified in a number of opinion pieces as the worst leader to walk the global stage since Hitler. Go figure.
For anybody who thought that would be the final chapter of the Syrian story does not understand the perseverance of the Western powers-that-be, especially when what it is at stake is one of the last countries on the planet that has not fallen under the domination of the global financial fascists.
ISIS, ISIS, who the heck is ISIS?
Suddenly, with all the fury of a sandstorm, a newly rebranded band of Islamic terrorists – ‘The Islamic State of Syria and the Levant (ISIS)’ – appeared on the scene with displays of violence and savagery so fantastic it often required the suspension of disbelief.
Exhibit Number One. In August 2014, one year after the US invasion of Syria got bogged down in crazy peace talk, a string of Western journalists found themselves conveniently kidnapped and duly decapitated by an English-speaking thug nicknamed ‘Jihadi John’. Yet with each released video a number of experts came out to declare the slick productions “staged.”
Stranger still, perhaps, is that the actual moments of decapitation were politely censored for viewing audiences, who have certainly witnessed worse spectacles in their neighborhood theaters on any given Friday night. But thanks anyways, Islamic State, for not totally grossing us out.
Following the alleged decapitation of James Foley, a forensic analyst told The Times that the video production was “rather odd” since no blood can be seen, even though the knife is drawn across the neck area at least six times.
“After enhancements, the knife can be seen to be drawn across the upper neck at least six times, with no blood evidence to the point the picture fades to black,” the analysis said.
Sounds purportedly made by Foley at the time of his alleged execution “do not appear consistent with what may be expected.”
And during Foley’s speech, there is a break in the tape that seems to indicate the kidnapped reporter had to repeat a line. Come again? The ruthless scum of Islamic State, which have gained notoriety for destroying ancient works of art, have now acquired the artistic flair to request a retake in the middle of an execution video?!
What would the ruthless Jihadi John tell his doomed captive in such an improbable scenario: “Ah, sorry mate, can you repeat that last line and with a little more enthusiasm this time?”
One expert commissioned to examine the footage was reported as saying: “I think it has been staged. My feeling is that the execution may have happened after the camera was stopped.”
Yet despite the speculation that this tape, and the others that appeared later, was about as real as an episode of The Flintstones, a warning was duly issued to the British people that viewing the cartoon could be considered a criminal act.
“We would like to remind the public that viewing, downloading or disseminating extremist material within the UK may constitute an offence under Terrorism legislation,” said UK Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe in a statement.
A rather laughable statement considering that it is government-connected agencies disseminating these video productions in the first place.
Another western journalist, Steven Sotloff, was also reported to have been decapitated in the same type of videotaped execution given to Mr. Foley – that is, complete with the polite censorship of the actual beheading. It’s not that I personally would wish to watch such a grisly act, but rather that it does not follow Islamic State’s ultra-violent modus operandi to censor the action.
Meanwhile, a Ukrainian hacktivist group that calls itself CyberBerkut dropped a bombshell, saying they hacked the cell phone of an aid to John McCain when the US Senator paid a visit to Ukraine in June. While it is impossible to prove the veracity of the claim, the video appears to show a stage-managed beheading scene of the sort we’ve seen on so many other occasions.
“An actor dressed as an executioner of IS is holding a knife to behead the prisoner, and the “victim” depicts to be suffering.The Islamic State for Iraq and Levant or IS executions are allegedly stage-managed,” reported TechWorm.
One asinine question leads to another: Why would a band of ruthless terrorists find it necessary to produce videos that were not the real McCoy? Why would the actual moment of the beheadings be censored for public consumption? Why would the authorities warn the public they could be committing a crime for watching such sterilized material? None of this makes much sense.
Although the mainstream media talking heads beseech us to believe that Western journalists were mercilessly killed by Islamic jihadists, nothing that has been presented to date would stand up in a court of law as irrefutable proof that a single murder has actually been committed.
Once again, the West’s NATO subjects are expected to cheer on the war on terror on the basis of nothing more substantial than hearsay and apparent horseplay.
Out of SITE, out of mind
The question must be asked where these finally crafted Islamic State videos come from. I give up, where do they come from? In the majority of cases, from the same people who brought Osama bin Laden looming into our living rooms: a privately owned group known as the SITE Intelligence Group, which tasks itself with the job of monitoring terrorist groups on social media.
The group has deep connections to the government, as well as a checkered past.
“One of SITE’s founders, Rita Katz, is a government insider with close connections to former terrorism czar Richard Clarke and his staff in the White House, as well as investigators in the Department of Justice, Department of the Treasury, and the Department of Homeland Security, according to SourceWatch… ”
In October 2007, it was revealed that the SITE Intelligence Group discovered and issued to the Bush administration a copy of an Osama bin Laden video that had yet to be released by al-Qaeda.
“Katz issued the video via a private link to a SITE web page to White House counsel Fred F. Fielding and Joel Bagnal, deputy assistant to the President for Homeland Security. Within 20 minutes, computers registered to various parts of the Executive Branch began downloading the video, and within hours a transcript referencing SITE had appeared on Fox News,” Global Researchreported.
In 2004, The New York Timesreported that some Islamic groups feel unfairly targeted by the work of Ms. Katz and her group.
“Ms. Katz’s institute, which relies on government contracts and corporate clients, may be the most influential of those groups, and she is among the most controversial of the cyberspace monitors.
While some experts praise her research as solid, some of her targets view her as a vigilante. Several Islamic groups and charities, for example, sued for defamation after she claimed they were terrorist fronts, even though they were not charged with a crime.”
Is the US media, not to mention the US government, displaying a bit too much credulity in putting all of their terrorist video sources into one basket? Judging by Ms. Katz’s professional and personal background and experience, it may be much more prudent to let the government handle the work of tracking the terrorists as opposed to private organizations with their own axe to grind.
In any case, the twisted tale of Islamic State has produced the desired effect: Just one month after the first questionable videotape surfaced of Mr. Foley being decapitated, the United States was doing exactly what it wanted to be doing one year earlier: bombing Syrian territory.
On Sept. 22, 2014, The Los Angeles Times heroically described the opening wave of fearless attacks against the baddies of Islamic States: “The United States and several allies launched airstrikes inside Syria for the first time late Monday, the Pentagon said, a heavy bombardment against multiple targets that marked an aggressive expansion of President Obama’s war on Islamic State militants.
Waves of U.S. fighter jets, bombers and armed drones slipped behind Syria’s fortified air defenses to drop precision-guided bombs on militant positions, while Navy ships offshore fired lethal salvos of Tomahawk cruise missiles.”
However, as time would tell, even the Western attacks on Islamic State appeared to be equally staged, as the terrorist group was suffering no measurable toll from this “wave” of attack.
Only after Russia entered the fray did the terrorist group – together with its oil-exporting business – begin to suffer real losses.
Robert Bridge is the author of the book on corporate power, “Midnight in the American Empire”, which was released in 2013.
Next week, Part II: West opens invisible front against Islamic State
Since mid-August 2014 major news organizations have conveyed videos allegedly found online by the SITE Intelligence Group.
Unsurprisingly the same media have failed to closely interrogate what the private company actually is and whether the material it promotes should be accepted as genuine.
The Search for International Terrorist Entities Intelligence Group (SITE) was co-founded by Rita Katz in 2001.
In 2003 Katz authored a book, Terrorist Hunter: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman Who Went Undercover to Infiltrate the Radical Islamic Groups Operating in America, which she published using the pseudonym, “Anonymous.”
In the book Katz explains how she took on the trappings of a Muslim woman to infiltrate the meetings of radical Muslim terrorists. The plot is unlikely, especially when one considers that such secret fundamentalist gatherings are almost always segregated along gender lines and no woman, however elaborate her costume, would be granted entry without her identity being firmly established.
SITE Intelligence Group consists of Katz and two “senior advisers,” one of whom is Bruce Hoffman, the Corporate Chair in Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency at the RAND Corporation and former director of the RAND’s Washington DC office.
The SITE Intelligence Group “constantly monitors the Internet and traditional media for material and propaganda released by jihadist groups and their supporters,” the company’s website announces.
“Once obtained, SITE immediately translates the material and provides the intelligence along with a contextual analysis explaining the source of the material and its importance to our subscribers.”[1]
In 2003 and 2004, SITE received financial support from the US government. Also in the early 2000s SITE was on contract providing consulting services to the FBI.[2]
It would appear that SITE has abandoned its non-profit status and now relies on corporate and individual subscriptions for revenue. In 2005 the private mercenary contractor Blackwater hailed SITE as “an invaluable resource.”[3]
The majority of “jihadist groups” operate one or more media outlets that produce and publish “the group’s multimedia, and in some cases, communiqués and magazines,” SITE explains on its website.
“These media units involve production teams and correspondents who report directly from the battlefield, and craft propaganda to indoctrinate and recruit new fighters into the group’s ranks.” SITE provides no direct links to the jihadist groups’ websites or multimedia productions from its own platform.[4]
Katz describes SITE as geared toward international Islamic jihad. “[W]e at SITE for over a decade monitor, search, and study the jihadists online,” she explains.
We have been studying and monitoring the jihadists online, which also as they get more sophisticated, we follow their techniques and study them. And based on that, we could predict where they will be uploading their video.
After all, we have to remember that much of this propaganda is being posted online. Their releases are released online [sic]. So they have to be able to use certain locations to upload their releases before they are published.[5]
Though routinely overlooked in the flurry of front-page coverage corporate media have allotted the three beheading videos–the most recent of which featured Scottish aid worker David Cawthorne Haines–it is common knowledge that SITE uncannily secures terrorist statements and videos well before the US’s wide array of lavishly-funded intelligence services.
For example, as the Washington Post reported in 2007,
[a] small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7 … It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release. Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By mid-afternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.[6]
The video later proved to be fraudulent.
With the above in mind, one may ask, If parties within a US presidential administration or the State Department sought to bypass the potential scrutiny of a wide-ranging intelligence community concerning such matters, while simultaneously providing itself with the means to effectively propagandize the American public toward a broader end, what better way than to contract the services of an entity such as SITE?
If there is some merit in the above appraisal, the arrangement is now being pushed to an extreme by the Obama administration to pave the road toward a long-sought goal: war with Syria’s Bashar Al Assad regime. Indeed, services such as SITE’s are a potent and valuable means for moving public opinion, as they have done in recent weeks concerning military action against the Islamic State. Along these lines, a decade ago both John Kerry and George W. Bush credited the latter’s re-election to a surreptitious appearance by Osama bin Laden via video tape several days before the vote.[7]
Playing a role similar to SITE, IntelCenter acts as an intermediary between Al-Qaeda’s supposed media arm, As-Sahab, and major media. In other words, “they acquire the tapes and pass them on to the press, and have occasionally even predicted when tapes would be released beforehand,” Paul Joseph Watson reports.
“IntelCenter is run by Ben Venzke, who used to be the director of intelligence at a company called IDEFENSE, which is a Verisign company. IDEFENSE is a web security company that monitors intelligence from the Middle East conflicts and focuses on cyber threats among other things. It is also heavily populated with long serving ex-military intelligence officials.[8]
As noted, news outlets seldom see fit to closely analyze SITE or Katz concerning their research and function as conduits for terrorist propaganda. A LexisNexis search for SITE Intelligence in the article content of US newspapers and major world publications over the past two years produces 317 items—an admittedly low figure given the prominence of SITE’s recent disclosures. Yet a similar search for “Steven Sotloff” alone yields over 1,000 newspaper stories and 600 broadcast transcripts, suggesting the sensationalistic usage and effect of SITE’s data and how neither SITE nor Katz are called upon to explain their specific methods and findings.
Indeed, a similar search for “SITE Intelligence” and “Rita Katz” yields only 26 entries over a two year period. Of these, 14 appear in the Washington Post, a publication with well-established links to US intelligence. Four New York Times articles feature the combined entities.
In a CNN on the heels of the Sotloff beheading, Katz explains how again SITE curiously surpassed the combined capacities of the entire US intelligence community in securing the Sotloff footage.
“The video shows the beheading of Steven Sotloff,” Katz cautiously begins after being queried on the document’s authenticity.
The location from where the video was obtained from is the location where ISIS usually uploads their original videos to [sic]. The video shows a clear message from ISIS that follows the same message that it had before. And in fact within a short time after our release, ISIS’ account on social media indicated that within a short time they would be releasing the video, only we actually had that video beforehand and were able to beat them with the release. (emphasis added)
This unusual statement alongside SITE’s remarkable abilities, should put news outlets on guard concerning the reliability of SITE statements.
Undoubtedly this is a great deal to ask from a news media that all too frequently participate in orienting public opinion toward war, a feat it has once again accomplished with the aid of SITE.
The interests and alliances of the transnational entities owning such media make them poised to profit from the very geopolitical designs drawn up by SITE’s corporate and government clients–the most important of which may be those seeking to broaden Middle Eastern conflict. No doubt, the wide-scale acceptance of such propaganda is also the result of the vastly diminished critical capacities of the broader public, now several decades in the making.
Notes
[1] “Services,” SITE Intelligence Group, , accessed September 15, 2014,
[3] “SITE Institute,” Sourcewatch.org, Center for Media and Democracy, n.d.
[4] “Media Groups,” SITE Intelligence Group, n.d., accessed September 15, 2014.
[5] Karl Penhaul, Pamela Brown, Alisyn Camerota, Don Lemon, Paul Cruickshank, “Joan Rivers on Life Support; Chilling Words From ISIS Terrorist; How to Fight Radical Recruitment” (transcript), CNN, September 2, 2014.
On August 13, 2018 Amazon banned Judaism’s Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded, which was published in 2011 and sold by Amazon for the past seven years. Along with the much larger study, Judaism Discovered, (sold by Amazon since 2008), it has had an international impact both as a softcover volume as well as a digital book circulating on the Amazon Kindle.
Sales to India, Japan and the Middle East were rapidly growing. The digital Kindle format is particularly important for the free circulation of books because it bypasses borders and customs and hurdles over the prohibitive cost of shipping which the US Postal Service imposed on mail to overseas destinations several years ago (eliminating economical surface mail).
These volumes maintain a high standard of scholarly excellence, had a majority of favorable reviews by Amazon customers, are free of hatred and bigotry and have sold thousands of copies on Amazon. Out of the blue we were told that suddenly “Amazon KDP” discovered that the books are in violation of Amazon’s “content guidelines.” Asking for documentation of the charge results in no response. It is enough that the accusation has been tendered. The accused are guilty until proved innocent, although how proof of innocence is presented is anyone’s guess. There is no appeals process. This is what is known as “Tech Tyranny.”
There is a nationwide purge underway that amounts to a new McCarthyism — blacklisting and banning politically incorrect speech and history books under the rubric of “hate speech” accusations, initiated in part by two Zionist thought police organizations, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). It’s a flimsy pretext for censoring controversial scholarly books that can’t be refuted.
In addition to our books being hate-free, we note that there are hundreds of hate-filled Zionist and rabbinic books brimming with ferocious bigotry for Palestinians, Germans and goyim in general, which are sold by Amazon. … continue
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