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"The truth is that the newspaper is not a place for information to be given, rather it is just hollow content, or more than that, a provoker of content. If it prints lies about atrocities, real atrocities are the result." Karl Kraus, 1914 WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH 1984 We are the world, we are exceptional, we cannot fail. The elite will lie, and the people will pretend to believe them. Heck about 20 percent of the American public will believe almost anything if it is wrapped with the right prejudice and appeal to passion. Have a pleasant evening. jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com, Feb 04, 2015 Journalists manipulate us in the interest of the PowerfulDo you also have the feeling, that you are often manipulated by the media and lied to? Then you're like the majority of Germans. Previously it was considered as a "conspiracy theory". Now it revealed by an Insider, who tells us what is really happening under the hood. The Journalist Udo Ulfkotte ashamed today that he spent 17 years in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. ...he reveals why opinion leaders produce tendentious reports and serve as the extended Arm of the NATO press office. ...the author also was admitted into the networks of American elite organizations, received in return for positive coverage in the US even a certificate of honorary citizenship. In this book you will learn about industry lobby organisations. The author calls hundreds of names and looks behind the Scenes of those organizations, which exert bias into media, such as: Atlantic bridge, Trilateral Commission, the German Marshall Fund, American Council on Germany, American Academy, Aspen Institute, and the Institute for European politics. Also revealed are the intelligence backgrounds of those lobby groups, the methods and forms of propaganda and financing used, for example, by the US Embassy. Which funds projects for the targeted influencing of public opinion in Germany ...You realize how you are being manipulated - and you know from whom and why. At the end it becomes clear that diversity of opinion will now only be simulated. Because our "messages" are often pure brainwashing.
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In 2014, German journalist Udo Ulfkotte, former director of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published groundbreaking book “Gekaufte Journalisten”, (Journalists for Hire), in which he documented relentless pressure of the CIA to lie about event, especially event of geopolitical importance. Unfortunately he died soon after publishing the book so it did not get any follow-up from Udo. Here is one quote from the book Udo wrotes (Google translation):
Novadays, our" alpha journalists " suffer from complete memory atrophy. For some reason, they cannot or at least do not want to recall today the lofty expressions in which they sang to us the war in Iraq or the military mission in Afghanistan. As they noticed the financial crisis and the collapse of the Euro only when every citizen has long suffered from their consequences. And when a passenger plane crashed over Ukraine in 2014, they were eager to immediately send our soldiers on a military mission against Russia, although it was not yet clear who was responsible for the crash. To prevent bloodshed by demanding more bloodshed is the principle of murderers. In Iraq alone, this is evidenced by the more than 100,000 civilians killed, who lost their lives there because our media – with very few exceptions – were in a state of hallucination caused by a drug overdose, describing with such unbridled glee the need for war in Iraq and thus bringing it closer to its beginning.
So who or what controls our insane mainstream media? Do our leading journalists actually take drugs? Or does this systematic madness have completely different reasons? Maybe there are propaganda specialists behind it? In the old days, such an assumption would probably have been dismissed as another "conspiracy theory." But today we know that journalists of respected media are the main goal of manipulators who seek to impose their interpretation of events taking place in the world through the messages of our media. So work, first of all, the us government and the Israelis. There are even handbooks that describe how to influence the quality MSM.
One thing is clear: those who work in respected media should be extremely cautious about groups lobbying for someone's interests, including American and Israeli. As we will soon see, some journalists do the exact opposite. Obviously, they feel great in the web-especially in the web of American and Israeli groups of influence. Yes, and they boast that they gave to confuse yourself in this web, proudly mentioning his "membership" in a very suspicious way.
The book now is available from Amazon under a different title: Presstitutes Embedded in the Pay of the CIA
"In the Pay of the CIA " is a figure of speech, a bit of poetic license. This book is not so much about the spies employed as journalists by the CIA. It’s more a first-person account of the ways ordinary journalists are bribed through their regular paychecks and perks, being used as intelligence assets indirectly. They also get favors and speaking fees from those they please, as Ulfkotte himself did from heads of state, oil companies, as well as the BND, or German CIA. And they must toe the party line. If journalists don’t stay on message about events, they aren’t invited again, they can lose their job. Ulfkotte’s target is the corruption of Elite Organizations and Mainstream Media, which set the tone and rules of the game for the puppets of the press. The entire political and media network is not only bought, it was installed by the Allies after WW2. It ensures permanent control over Germany through organizations like the Atlantic-Briicke, the CFR, or NATO. The media serve the interests of NATO, the war party, and big business, not their readership. Ulfkotte’s original title translates to Bought Journalists: How Politicians, Intelligence Agencies and High Finance Control Germany's Mass Media, which is a good description of his revelations. So he blames Politicians first and foremost. The greatest corruption is at the highest levels.Several
Several authors wrote several interesting follow-up articles. Some of then touched this topic even before the book was published. One example is the article US and British media are servants of security apparatus in which Greenwald explains why US and British media are so one sided (RT, Dec 27, 2013):
Dec 27, 2013 | RT News
...When Greenwald and his colleagues began working with Snowden, he said they realized that they’d have to act in a way that wasn’t on par with how the mainstream media has acted up until now.
“We resolved that we were going to have to be very disruptive of the status quo — not only the surveillance and political status quo, but also the journalistic status quo,” Greenwald said. “And I think one of the ways that you can see what it is that we were targeting is in the behavior of the media over the past six months since these revelations have emerged almost entirely without them and despite them.”
“[W]e knew in particular that one of our most formidable adversaries was not simply going to be the intelligence agencies on which we were reporting and who we were trying to expose, but also their most loyal, devoted servants, which calls itself the United States and British media.”
“It really is the case that the United States and British governments are not only willing but able to engage in any conduct no matter how grotesque,” Greenwald said.
Nevertheless, he added, journalists tasked with reporting on those issues have all too often been compliant with the blatant lies made by officials from those governments.
Halfway through his remarks, Greenwald recalled a recent quip he made while being interviewed by BBC about the necessity of a functioning media in an environment where government officials can spew untruths to reporters without being questioned.
“[A]t one point I made what I thought was the very unremarkable and uncontroversial observation that the reason why we have a free press is because national security officials routinely lie to the population in order to shield their power and get their agenda advanced,” recalled Greenwald, who said it is both the “the goal and duty of a journalist is to be adversarial to those people in power.”
According to Greenwald, the BBC reporter met his remark with skepticism.
“I just cannot believe that you would suggest that senior officials, generals in the US and the British government, are actually making false claims to the public,” he remembered being told on-air.
“It really is the central view of certainly American and British media stars, that when — especially people with medals on their chest who are called generals, but also high officials in the government — make claims that those claims are presumptively treated as true without evidence. And that it’s almost immoral to call them into question or to question their voracity,” he said.
“Obviously we went through the Iraq War, in which those very two same governments specifically and deliberately lied repeatedly to the government, to their people, over the course of two years to justify an aggressive war that destroyed a country of 26 million people. But we’ve seen it continuously over the last six months as well.”
From there, he went on to cite the example of US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who earlier this year made remarks to Congress that were quickly proved false by documents leaked to Greenwald by Mr. Snowden. The very first National Security Agency document he was shown, Greenwald said,
“revealed that the Obama administration had succeeded in convincing court, a secret court, to compel phone companies to turn over to the NSA every single phone record of every single telephone call.”
Clapper “went to the Senate and lied to their faces...which is at least as serious of a crime as anything Edward Snowden is accused of," Greenwald added.
But DNI Clapper aside, Greenwald said that the established media continues to reject the notion that government officials spew lies. Snowden’s NSA documents have exposed those fibs on more than one occasion, he noted, yet reporters around the world continue to take the word of officials as fact rather than dig from the truth.
“Their role is not to be adversarial. Their role is to be loyal spokespeople to those powerful factions that they pretend to exercise oversight,” Greenwald said.
But as the US, UK and other governments continue to feed the media lies, Greenwald said their operations are far from being single-pronged. The US
“knows that its only hope for continuing to maintain its regiment of secrecy behind which it engages with radical and corrupt acts is to intimidate and deter and threaten people who are would-be whistleblowers and transparency activists from coming forward and doing what it is that they do by showing them that they’ll be subjected to even the most extreme punishments and there’s nothing that they can do about it,” he said. “And it’s an effective tactic.”
Ironically, he added, those nations are “fueling the fire of this activism with their own abusive behavior.”
... ... ...
The NSA’s goal, Greenwald said, is to “ensure that all forms of human communication . . .are collected, monitored, stored and analyzed by that agency and by their allies.”
In 2014, German journalist Udo Ulfkotte, former director of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, author of the book “Gekaufte Journalisten”, (Journalists for Hire), denounced European media who write lies under pressure from the CIA. An English translation now is available but is very expensive
Here are Google translations of reviews from German Amazon site:
Christian Döring HALL OF FAME REZENSENT TOP 50 REZENSENT VINE-product tester 18. September 2014
Ulfkotte has in the last few years, several very readable books on social issues. Long ago, I agree with all agree with this now this I agree with him completely!
At the latest since the beginning of the Ukraine-conflict, I am frequently asked, who owns the journalists on the many channels, the me all the absolute truth declare? Sure, each individual with its very subjective truth, and the he also conceded, because, this is human. But journalists against money only say or write, what the donors have to hear or want to read, this is demokratiegefährdend!
Scary is when you read that the author not only describes individual cases, but how a whole System was set up. It's called the horse and rider.
After reading it, I am a little helpless around. What can I such a concentrated Power, purchased journalists, in turn, Lobbyistenfilz hang oppose? Ulfkotte advises you to quota and the requirement to spoil. Is this feasible?
In all cases, you should take the information from this book into his brain inside. At the next newscast must be clear: The recently aufgetischte is just one of the many truths! If you really want to be well informed will have today on the way to messages of different channels to compare, so it will have different truths. In my opinion, it is not only a news source to be trusted.
Udo Ulfkotte has my good faith of the sellers to the Guild of journalists thoroughly destroyed!
The Journalist Udo Ulfkotte ashamed today that, he spent 17 years in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has worked. Before the author of the secret networks of Power revealed, he exercises consistently self-criticism. It is documented here for the first Time, as he is for his coverage in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung lubricated and the corruption was promoted. And he reveals why opinion leaders tendentious reports and as the extended Arm of the NATO press office wars medial prepared. As a matter of course was also the author of into the networks of American elite level organizations included, received in return for positive coverage in the US even a certificate of honorary citizenship.
In this book you will learn, in what industry lobby organisations which journalists are represented. The author calls hundreds of names and looks behind the Scenes of those organizations, which our media propaganda one-sided influence, such as: Atlantic bridge, Trilateral Commission, the German Marshall Fund, American Council on Germany, American Academy, Aspen Institute, and the Institute for European politics. To be revealed in addition, the intelligence backgrounds of the lobby groups, the Propagandatechniken and the forms, with which, for example, at the US Embassy funding for projects for the targeted influencing of public opinion in Germany is able to retrieve.
If the CIA pretends to, what is written
Can you imagine that Geheimdienstmitarbeiter in editorial writing, which would then be in the editorial section under the name of well-known journalists to be published? Do you know which journalists which media for their coverage were smeared? And you have a rough idea of how renowned journalism prizes" to be awarded? Because it goes in the Background as the former honors the "heroes of work" in the former East Germany as propaganda work excellent. From the journalists to the propagandists, it is not far. If you read this book, you are our Newspapers with very different eyes to see the TV more often, simply relax and also know what the Radio is still able to believe: almost nothing. Because Ulfkotte also writes a lot of attention to which transmitter which political party and which journalists like to be influenced. You realize how you are being manipulated - and you know from whom and why. At the end it becomes clear that diversity of opinion will now only be simulated. Because our "messages" are often pure brainwashing.
Stevie TOP 500 REVIEWER on may 18. September 2014
As the networks (and the American influence in this), our messages to manipulate, and how journalists "sold"!
Perhaps surprised the a* or other why of the "quality media" in certain topics of the same opinion (at best in light shades)?! "The Euro is good for Germany, Eurorettungspakete are necessary to stabilize the Eurozone, We need a free trade agreement, and Germany will benefit the most (Why write the press hardly content about TTIP and not even as good as over TISA!???), USA is good, Russia is bad, sanctions against Russia are necessary ... etc ... also the reporting on the BNP-espionage affair was more than one-sided. Why is mostly written, that politicians are listening – what is with the Monitoring of the whole population???, ...
Here In the present volume: 1 (of a total of 3 planned volumes) is about, what is the secret networks of our flood control. The topic – such as the "quality media" to influence public opinion or to have a massive influence - is for gutinformierte citizens is certainly not new and was also publicly a couple of times already taken up for example by the ZDF-Satiresendung "The institution" (in shipment from the 29. Apri 2014) or in the ARTE documentary "Used and controlled" (2006), or in the doctoral thesis of Uwe Krueger "Meinungsmacht. The influence of elites on key media and Alpha-journalists - a critical analysis of networks" or in Andreas Elter – The Kriegsverkäufer: history of US Propaganda 1917-2005, etc read more... "
champmerle on 6. October 2014
more transparency in the media is required
When you Open the newspaper, the reader will hardly be inspired, in the press building a significant degree of corruption present. After the sheet comes with one but unobtrusive presentation, therefore, and is apparently as a reputable, long-established newspaper. But when you read the new book by Ulfkotte turns very quickly, the perceived seriousness as a pure Illusion, as the Fata Morgana.
From autobiographical reasons sets Ulfkotte his Kritikschwerpunkt of what is going on in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, but also in other Newspapers such as the Süddeutsche, the time or the world will remain not ungeschont.
What is it about?
The charge ranges from Compose or approve of Gefälligkeitsberichten bestochener correspondents, concrete influence of the secret service BND, linkages of Zeitungsgrößen with elite circles such as the Atlantic bridge or the Bilderbergern and on the other hand, the prevention of the documentation which is tangible scandals reveal. Also from Overreaching by Advertisers is the speech.
Throughout acts the written composition as a clear provocation, and virtually every accusation put forward in the Annex shows. It is remarkable, that in many cases specific name to be called.
It now remains to be seen whether the German "key media" an open discussion of the criticisms Ulfkottes. An analysis was spared, it would be in my eyes an indication of the Declaration of bankruptcy of the above-mentioned Pressehäuser.
Personally, I wish I was basically the survival of the newspaper publishers, these are a part of our culture, it is also a very important factor the maintenance of employment.This assumes, however, that immediately a total reorientation in the nature of the information gathering and processing are entering. Interessensunabhängigkeit the content and balance of the published articles are essential, honesty, openness and credibility are the standards.
Edgar Hülswitt - All my reviews reputation
This review is from: Bought journalists (Hardcover)
If only the lie can save us, so it is, we are lost." (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Genevan philosopher, educator, writer, and musician 1712 – 1778)
Why is it that now only every 3. German confidence in the so-called "quality media", yet only 15% of us politicians trust, 63% of their Faith in an objective and truthful Ukraine-reporting of German-speaking media have lost and with decreasing tendency, only 37% of the job description of journalists as a trustworthy recognise?
Perhaps the fact that one part of many media − in the sense of Wirtschaftslobbyisten, politicians and other (inter)national sponsors with increasingly zealous umgesetztem Gefälligkeitsjournalismus grossly exaggerated.
UDO ULFKOTTE: Purchased journalists
Perhaps there are many German slowly just suffering, from such quality media ‒ for which you also have to pay expensive must be wrong and/or subjectively informed, lied to and to be influenced? Adults, responsible citizens have a right to factual, unbiased information, and can well and happy on manipulative aufgehübschte interpretations lubricated journalists do without. With disgust and Frighten you can to the disenchantment of our extensively decorated elites to take note of and when you read the reading will be experience blue miracle, if the author step-by-step, page-by-page, line-by-line suggestive power plays and machinations revealed to us before the eyes causes, how shameless us politicians, intelligence agencies, lobbyists and moneyed with the help of Germany's mass media (to Ruin) steer.
The interest in the subject seems obvious unbroken, because since weeks already ranked the non-fiction book by Udo Ulfkotte: Purchased journalists remain on the front seats of the Spiegel bestseller list. Insider Udo Ulfkotte, obviously, has the nerve of the time taken. Never before were so many German citizens, politics and medienverdrossener. If the established media ‒ like the other day, including "THE WORLD" ‒ good advice, also Oil on the fire, pour in the "political" journalists with a platform for lurid provocations offer? Here, z. B. under the title "The German pot is boiling over with pent up anger", across the Board on Fears and Concerns of German citizens, ‒ the top-down as "Putinversteher, Vulgärpazifisten and defender of the Western world" denigrated , made fun of, and to rejoice in the round ridiculed: "The Lunatics in this country are always angry" and the audience smugly recommended that this Crazy easy "wegzulachen". Bad only that many citizens obviously now the last Laugh.
UDO ULFKOTTE: Purchased journalists
While Udo Ulfkotte committed, during his professional journalistic career in serious cover-up of the so-called free press and freedom of expression − from elitist lobbying clients was corrupted to his, wrapping both his partially still in German Medienwesen active former superiors and colleagues, as well as other well-known journalists and publicists, not only in noble Silence. No, you deny even any Motivation with regard to their activities with ignorance. And it gives the media at least at this point Believe, are also our well-established representatives of the people/students continue to conscientiously and diligently and endeavour to unwanted public criticism and Meinungsfindungen to prevent. Use but even their speeches to the turn of the year, especially to moral appeals, all all dissatisfied with care in the future-looking citizens from participating in demonstrations to warn, instead of yourself (self -) critical in itself to go and settle the allegations (even their own party members) after a possible complicity in the displeasure of many people. It does just education on the move - and backgrounds ‒ instead of ignorant paternalism and bürgerferner concealment always conspicuous to days chief problems ‒ Not. Click HERE to read what the author, both to the controversial socio-political issue as such, as well as to the handling of the recent events, has to say.
The interesting, 336 pages strong, demaskierende publication by Udo Ulfkotte: Purchased journalists (ISBN 978-3-86445-143-0) ‒ the chronic non-voters and/or voter apathy-suffering citizens in droves to the ballot should drive, as a hardcover at the Kopp Verlag for the price of € 22,95 appeared. You may also click at the end of the book announced a further two controversial publications on the media industry to be curious about.
lesemehrwert.deM. Herrmann, 30. April 2015
Every reader must be his own to figure it out, It is here of many cases reported in which journalistic Output is not by the will to Wahrheitswiedergabe is characterized.
Instead, one finds Gefälligkeitstexte for Powerful from economy and politics. And not only in the newspaper with the bold letters, but also in those times that serious.
The Motivation is clear: career, personal benefits, conceit Elitetum.
What Mr. Ulfkotte reported, seems to me to be credible, especially when you Nachrichtenkonsum yourself open to questions.
One gets from the book is no quantitative statements about the shape: In the period from ... to ... were in the newspaper ... so many percent of the article glossed over. Or: We find an increase / decrease in tendenziöser reporting during ... .... This is also difficult to do, especially by an individual.
Therefore, it remains so up to you to assess whether he/she is equal to the entire German press for corrupt or holds only a share, whatever the size of the may be. A is in any case clear-at the latest after the reading of the "Purchased journalists"- caution and the question of "Who benefits?" is always appropriate.
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Jul 16, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Today the Guardian published another fake 'Russiagate' story:
Kremlin papers appear to show Putin's plot to put Trump in White House
Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a "mentally unstable" Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia's national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.
...
Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.Yaawwwnn ...
We know, without reading it, that the story is fake because its main author is Luke Harding. Harding also authored the story which claimed that Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manaford met Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. That story was proven to be false but the Guardian , to its shame, still has it up on its website .
In 2017 Luke Harding abruptly ended an interview with Aaron Maté after Harding was challenged over false claims he had made in his book about 'Russiagate'. The last five minutes of that video are quite amusing .
The Guardian story claims that the 'leaked' nonsense paper was discussed in high level Kremlin meeting in January 2016. It was then decided, it alleges, to support Trump. But in January 2016 there was no one, not even Donald Trump himself, who thought that he would win the Republican primary or even the presidency. But the Kremlin is supposed to have discussed him at the highest level well before anyone thought he could win?
Various people make interesting remarks about the new Guardian fakery:
Tara McCormack @McCormack_Tara - 12:13 UTC · Jul 15, 2021I am seriously coming to the conclusion that Luke Harding is a Russian operative who has been put in place as part of a long term dastardly plan to make British journalism appear ridiculous.
--- Craig Murray @CraigMurrayOrg - 12:02 UTC · 15 Jul 2021The next Luke Harding MI6 hoax.
Passing off forged Kremlin minutes saying things like "It is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate his [Trump's] election to the post of US president."
Hilarious
theguardian.com/world/2021/jul"¦--- Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald - 12:07 UTC · 15 Jul 2021The part of the media that feigns anger at misinformation is uncritically promoting a story today by Luke Harding that Russia was blackmailing Trump -- the same Harding who has published many false stories, championed the Steele Dossier and claimed Trump was long a Russian agent.
...
Now suddenly, Harding claims he obtained leaked, highly sensitive Kremlin documents that just so happen to prove all the lies he's been peddling for years, that not even Mueller's huge team found. Because it advances liberals' interests, journalists are uncritically spreading it.
...
I will once use this shabby behavior to against highlight 2 points:1) The contempt and loss of trust people harbor for the corporate media is completely justified and well-earned.
2) These outlets are by far the most prolific and destructive disseminators of disinformation.
Even people who are typically inclined to promote all kinds of anti-Russian nonsense are cautious on this item.
Thomas Rid @RidT - 12:38 UTC · 15 Jul 2021This Guardian story is likely to make big waves. I would remain somewhat cautious for now, however. For a "leak" of this magnitude, we need at least some details on the chain of custody. Also note the Guardian's own hedging ("papers appear to show") theguardian.com/world/2021/jul"¦
--- Pwn All The Things @pwnallthethings - 14:40 UTC · 15 Jul 2021Also, just putting this out there, if the US had this and thought it was real, how likely is it that it would have survived the waterfall of leaks of the past few years? And yet, here we are, with this as exclusive by the UK's Guardian, and conspicuously not, say, WaPo or NYT.
Christopher Steele, the 'former' British intelligence officer who peddle the fake dossier about alleged Russian Trump kompromat on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign, worked and still works for Orbis Intelligence, a British private outlet run by 'former' British spies.
They are still at it ...
Orbis Business Intelligence @OrbisBIOfficial - 10:48 UTC · Jul 15, 2021Great reporting on an important story.
Luke Harding @lukeharding1968 - 10:02 UTC · Jul 15, 2021Exclusive: Leaked Putin papers appear to show #Russia's plot to put a "mentally unstable" Donald Trump into the White House "" my story with @julianborger in Washington and @dansabbagh in London
Kremlin papers appear to show Putin's plot to put Trump in White House"Great reporting.. " "..important story"
Yeah. Sure. Whatever.
Posted by b on July 15, 2021 at 15:20 UTC | Permalink
Bemildred , Jul 15 2021 15:31 utc | 1
Bemildred , Jul 15 2021 15:33 utc | 2
They embarass us all with this sort of stupidity. And being British, of course, they double down on it." REVEALED: Iran plotted to kidnap Iranian-American journalist from Brooklyn, transport her by speedboat to Venezuela and then fly her to the Islamic republic because she criticized regime, FBI say"
You just cannot get much more ludicrous than that.
And lots of projection too, we all know who lies and indulges in all sorts of chicanery to silence critics (like Assange, say).james , Jul 15 2021 15:50 utc | 3damn you gottlieb! look what you started, lol...james , Jul 15 2021 15:52 utc | 4thanks b... these intel agencies running the "free press" sure are getting boring really fast....
@ 1 bemildred.... i knew it was a lie when i heard it on the cbc radio yesterday... if the cbc is running with it - it is an outright made up lie... accept everything on the surface and never question anything!!! be a good citizen, lol...Bigben , Jul 15 2021 16:00 utc | 5The articles from The Guardian and all don't prove anything about Russia's plans. The cite the January 26 meeting of the Security Council as Proof of Putin's plans. If I were in Putin's place, I would also have been happy with Trump's election and its likely socioeconomic impact on the US society.Tuyzentfloot , Jul 15 2021 16:12 utc | 6Harding strikes me as someone who's completely into the business of selling stories. He senses where the money is , looks at his sales numbers and concludes he's doing great because that is how he measures things. No concept of 'truth' other than financial success in the market of ideas. I suspect he makes a lot of money.the pair , Jul 15 2021 16:18 utc | 7damn, i wish i had it in me to be a cult leader...i'd make a beeline to the guardian office and have an army of kool-aid drinking simps at my disposal. when they aren't harrassing and firing women writers for calling out "female identifying" sex offenders in dresses or stirring up imaginary "anti-semitism" they're peddling this delusional nonsense and LARPing as MI6 spooks. truly in their own little world. i'll guess some LSD in the water cooler and a decent powerpoint presentation is all it would take to be the limey jim jones.Ð"жММ , Jul 15 2021 16:35 utc | 8The chunks of the supposed document that the Guardian included with its article really give it away. The text - supposedly from an internal Kremlin communication - reads as no more or less than a chunk of English passed through Google Translate. Idiomatically, it is chock full of awkwardness and simple ridiculous phrasings. There are even grammatical errors! "..во Ð²Ñ€ÐµÐ¼Ñ Ð¿Ñ€ÐµÐ±Ñ‹Ð²Ð°Ð½Ð¸Ñ ÐµÐ³Ð¾..." is simply incorrect. In Russian, the last two words are reversed in order.vk , Jul 15 2021 16:55 utc | 9It recalls the recent Putin's Palace story, with the "комната грÑзи".
It's just shameful how little pride the propagandists take in their work. I understand that they hold their audience in only the lowest of regard (not without cause, to be fair), but it's not like there is any shortage of Russian-speakers in the west they could go to for proofreading, if not copy writing.
Kremlin's response came out:Stonebird , Jul 15 2021 17:18 utc | 10Peskov called the article by The Guardian about the authorities of Russia and Trump a fiction
"Of course, this is such a continuation of absolutely low-quality publications. Either the newspaper is trying to somehow increase its popularity, or the newspaper continues such a frenzied Russophobic line. Of course, all this does not and cannot correspond to the truth. This, in fact, is not true ... This is a continuation of the exercises on total demonization of Russia and Putin, which The Guardian sometimes likes to do, or is it a desperate attempt to attract some new readers by publishing such tales, "Peskov said."REVEALED: Iran plotted to kidnap Iranian-American journalist from Brooklyn, transport her by speedboat to Venezuela and then fly her to the Islamic republic because she criticized regime, FBI say", Bemildred | Jul 15 2021 15:31 utc | 1pnyx , Jul 15 2021 17:18 utc | 11I TOLD you all that the FBI needed new script writers. Either that or they have so little imagination that they have to use up all the scripts from a couple of years back, as they cannot afford new ones.
******
Don't underestimate stupidity
Luke 'Skywalker' Harding defeats the evil empire. Part 13.Citizen621 , Jul 15 2021 17:58 utc | 12Doesn't matter - the MSNBC watchers will never accept this. I still try to punch through the armor of confirmation bias now and then. My last jab was: "I think Russiagate is every bit as much evidence-free bullshit as Quanon!". No effect whatsoever. Willing to agree with half of what I said - just like Fox watchers.jo6pac , Jul 15 2021 18:07 utc | 13Unfortunately, I don't think my fellow citizens here in the heart of Pindostan will pay attention until things get bad enough that they know actual hunger - and then they will serve the elites by fighting each other.
Sorry for the pessimism, the one positive thing I do think I can do is tend my vegetable garden!
Amerikan intel agrees it fake but they will walk it back soon I'm sureQA , Jul 15 2021 18:53 utc | 14Ð"жММ:Thomas , Jul 15 2021 20:22 utc | 15"во Ð²Ñ€ÐµÐ¼Ñ Ð¿Ñ€ÐµÐ±Ñ‹Ð²Ð°Ð½Ð¸Ñ ÐµÐ³Ð¾", maybe awkward but semikosher, many examples can be found Googling it ---like during stay of his vs. during his stay (e.g. kamchatka.mid.ru can be found to say: "ÑвÑÐ·Ð°Ð½Ð½Ñ‹Ñ Ñ Ð´ÐµÐ¹ÑтвиÑми и поÑтупками пригÐ"ашаемого во Ð²Ñ€ÐµÐ¼Ñ Ð¿Ñ€ÐµÐ±Ñ‹Ð²Ð°Ð½Ð¸Ñ ÐµÐ³Ð¾ в РФ, в том чиÑÐ"е, в ÑÐ"учае депортации").
Jeez, it just gets worse-as soon as I saw the name Luke harding, I knew it was a pile of trash; really, who in the hell reads this without a sense to vomit.Cadence calls , Jul 15 2021 20:28 utc | 16Well, there there is Orbis: "great reporting."
MI6 and prob cia has this clown on the payroll; I tried to watch the last 5 minutes of the video but could not get past the first minute; the guy is absolutely repulsive and they continue to double down on this garbage.
Headlines on Democratic Underground and Daily KOS:Thomas , Jul 15 2021 20:30 utc | 17
"Explosive evidence that Putin supported a Trump Presidency"Commenters: "I knew it!"
Ð"жММ-8librul , Jul 15 2021 21:41 utc | 18I think you really nailed it; we see it every day, with this latest pail of s___, that these purveyors absolutely have no shame or embarrassment, but believe their audience, the sheeple, are complete idiots or stupid. The question is who is stupid as this level of stupidity cannot be fixed or underestimated.
I remember the scene in the movie "The Big Short" where Steve Carellvk , Jul 15 2021 22:11 utc | 19
was saying, "they knew all along!".Goldman Sachs, et al, had over-leveraged the housing mortgages and "they knew all along"
if and when it all crumbled the government would cover Wall Street's bad bets with taxpayer debt.They knew all along it was bs but they did it anyway.
The MSM is a different arena but has the same arrogant attitude towards average joe citizen.
The MSM knows it is selling bs but they don't care.
What I see is they are counting on the "Reiteration Effect" (look it up, it is a real thing).
"Russia bad", "Russia bad", "Russia bad", "Russia bad", "Russia bad", "Russia bad".There have been a steady stream of "Russia bad" stories and "Russia helped Trump" stories, and over time
the fact that these stories are one by one debunked does not matter. The "Reiteration Effect" is what matters.
"Say something a million times and it becomes true" is not a mere cynical phrase, it actually works - the "Reiteration Effect".Keep putting out these "Russia bad" stories and "Russia helped Trump" stories and over time people will accept the basic message as true.
The MSM has known all along they were selling bs, but they don't care.
@ Posted by: librul | Jul 15 2021 21:41 utc | 18librul , Jul 15 2021 22:23 utc | 20They definitely didn't know 2008 would happen. On the contrary: they thought they had discovered the elixir of immortality for capitalism.
The USA was caught completely off-guard in September 2008. You have to search with a magnifying glass to find the ten people who predicted the crisis would happen in its nature and more or less its timing - but even then, most of them were Marxists, i.e. outside the commanding heights of the USG.
@Posted by: vk | Jul 15 2021 22:11 utc | 19Tuyzentfloot , Jul 15 2021 22:41 utc | 21Goldman Sachs began to short mortgage bonds and like instruments before the crash of 2008.
Regardless, they *knew* their bets were covered by the government.
---
Were you aware that Henry Paulson began to ready a coup in 2008?
I like the idea of the makers of this thing deciding that it's a shoddy job which only Harding will take. Also Harding gets all the attention but let's not forget the honourable mentions in this story: Julian Borger and Dan Sabbagh.librul , Jul 15 2021 22:49 utc | 22@Posted by: librul | Jul 15 2021 22:23 utc | 20 ....continuedMichael888 , Jul 15 2021 23:01 utc | 23I saved this from somewhere (?) years ago. Doesn't matter, you can read Paulson's coup document for yourself.
The WSJ link still works but you hit a pay wall. You can put the following url at http://web.archive.org/
and read the original WSJ publication and Paulson's coup document dated Sept 20, 2008 at the WSJ.http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/09/20/treasurys-financial-bailout-proposal-to-congress/
**** "shall not be subject to judicial review" ****http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/09/20/treasurys-financial-bailout-proposal-to-congress/
"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."
Did you catch that? Paulson went further. Not just the courts are cut out but "any adminstrative agency" as well.
Paulson also was giving to Himself the authority to APPROPRIATE any funds He wished.
"Any funds expended for actions authorized by this Act, including the payment of administrative expenses, shall be deemed appropriated at the time of such expenditure."
HE could pass ANY legislation He wanted to:
"(5) issuing such regulations and other guidance as may be necessary or appropriate to define terms or carry out the authorities of this Act."
The word "term" has a duel meaning. It also refers to TIME, as in length of a term.
Give powers to anyone and hire anyone He wished to:
"(1) appointing such employees as may be required to carry out the authorities in this Act and defining their duties;"
What miscellaneous authorities did G-d Paulson give Himself? Answer: Authority over the police and the military.
"In exercising the authorities granted in this Act, the Secretary shall take into consideration means for""
(1) providing stability or preventing disruption to the financial markets or banking system; and
"providing stability OR". That OR makes for confusion (intentional confusion). Stability is a word used often in the context of economics but it is also used in the context of police action. Get it? He wants to create his own SS. See the very next word: "protecting", as in "We Serve and Protect".
(2) protecting the taxpayer."
The last one is my favorite. Who is a *taxpayer*? Hmmm, is not everyone, even candy purchasing kids liable to pay tax? Corporations are also taxpayers...
G-d Paulson covered all his bases.
Even the one about being G-d Forever:
"Sec. 9. Termination of Authority.
The authorities under this Act, with the exception of authorities granted in sections 2(b)(5), 5 and 7, shall terminate two years from the date of enactment of this Act."
Paulson wants you to believe this terminates in two years. However, 2(b)(5) does NOT terminate and that one says he can just place the crown back on His own head:
"(5) issuing such regulations and other guidance as may be necessary or appropriate to define terms or carry out the authorities of this Act."
Cheers
A coup! A massive scandal that has been totally missed.
@Posted by: librul | Jul 15 2021 21:41 utc | 18corvo , Jul 15 2021 23:16 utc | 24"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."-- Joseph Goebbels (Luke Harding's Father?)
@ Cadence calls | Jul 15 2021 20:28 utc | 16:Dim sim , Jul 15 2021 23:31 utc | 25We can take some comfort in the fact that Daily Kos readership has fallen precipitously over the last few years. Nobody takes it seriously anymore.
In 2017 Luke Harding abruptly ended an interview with Aaron Maté after Harding was challenged over false claims he had made in his book about 'Russiagate'. The last five minutes of that video are quite amusing.mismatch , Jul 15 2021 23:49 utc | 26I'm not normally a follower of this topic even though one of our sleazers, Downer, was involved but needing something to smile at while in our CV lockdown I watched the link.
What an understatement! It's a hilarious 28m:51s train wreck interview with a complete dick. Thanks b for sharing it.
@Vk, I'm sorry to contradict you but if you pick up a copy of the Financial Times in 2008 before the crash, everyone was predicting it. I checked recently, and sure enough, it was all over the paper.TEP , Jul 16 2021 0:18 utc | 27Luke Harding. Nuff said.Erelis , Jul 16 2021 0:22 utc | 28
TEP.Once again super duper evil genius ex-KGB spy cannot keep state secrets secret.Christian J. Chuba , Jul 16 2021 0:24 utc | 29Painful video to watch. Harding is using the Hitler argument.vk , Jul 16 2021 0:39 utc | 30'My evidence that Trump colluded with Putin (Saddam has WMD) is that Putin is Hitler. If you don't believe me, you are supporting Adolf Hitler'.
Harding is Satan's minion, and Jesus said, 'Satan is a liar and a murderer, when he lies, he speaks his native language'
Lies kill.
@ Posted by: mismatch | Jul 15 2021 23:49 utc | 26By 2007, the financial elite already knew something would happen - but not a structural crisis. In fact, they predicted nothing: the chain of bankruptcies started at the end of 2006; September 2008 was just the date it "leaked" to the "real economy".
Not every crisis is bad for capitalism. Cyclical crisis are natural and beneficial to capitalism. The crisis of 2008 was not a cyclical crisis, but a structural one. They probably thought it was either a cyclical crisis (a la Dotcom crisis of 2000) or, if something more serious, something the free market would easily be able to "self-regulate" out of.
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Jul 21, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Lysander , Jul 17 2021 11:31 utc | 2
...WaPo columnist George Will then asserts:
Henry Kissinger has said, not unreasonably, that we are in "the foothills" of a cold war with China. And Vladimir Putin, who nurses an unassuageable grudge about the way the Cold War ended, seems uninterested in Russia reconciling itself to a role as a normal nation without gratuitous resorts to mendacity. It is, therefore, well to notice how, day by day, in all of the globe's time zones, civilized nations are, in word and deed, taking small but cumulatively consequential measures that serve deterrence.If arrogance were a deadly disease, George Will would be dead.
George Will has been an ass clown since I first had the displeasure of watching him in the 1970s. Age has not brought an ounce of wisdom. Nevertheless, this total lack of self reflection and ability to project American sins on others is unfortunately not unique to our man George. It seems a habit throughout the entire US political spectrum. The ability to view, for example, the invasion of Iraq as perfectly normal behavior, while viewing any resistance to US/Israeli dominance as beyond the pale is the character of the decaying American superpower. George Will is but one manifestation of it. It was once infuriating. But now it's simply like listening to the ravings of a schizophrenic. More pathetic than anything else.
Dao Gen , Jul 17 2021 11:35 utc | 3
What do you expect from George Swill? He is a pathetic, disoriented refugee from his home in Victorian England, when barbarism never set for a single instant on the British Empire.Donbass Lives Matter , Jul 17 2021 11:45 utc | 4There's a way to get the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth from the mainstream news media. Just look at their propaganda and ask yourself, "Why do they want me to believe this particular lie?" If you can figure that you, you will have the truth.alaff , Jul 17 2021 11:52 utc | 5Well, you know, the white man's burden...Midville , Jul 17 2021 11:57 utc | 7
The funny thing is that they seriously consider themselves a "superior race", while behaving like wild barbarians.
Such opinions/articles of "Western civilized people" cause only a condescending smile, nothing more. So let's let George Will entertain us.Perimetr , Jul 17 2021 12:16 utc | 11I find it pretty bizzarre how western media obsessively try to portray the Defender incident as a some sort of "victory" for "civilized nations".
What exactly is the victory here? The fact that Russia only resorted to warning fire and didn't blow up the ship?Ayatoilet , Jul 17 2021 12:50 utc | 16Decades of propaganda masquerading as news has led most "educated" Americans into a Matrix of false narratives. Should you dare mention election fraud or question the safety of COVID vaccines in the presences of anyone who considers the NY Times and Wash Post as the "papers of record", they will be happy to inform you that you are "captured" by false news. Dialogue with these true believers has become almost impossible. We are the indispensable, civilized nation, don't you understand basic facts?
My sister, who is truly a good-hearted person, unfortunately keeps CNN and MSNBC on most of the day in her small apartment, and lives for The NY Times, which she pours over, especially the weekend edition. She knows that Putin is evil and Russia is a bad place to live, etc etc. I got rid of my TV ten years ago and started looking elsewhere for my information. I live in a rural area of a Red state, she lives in Manhattan. We have to stick to topics that revolve around museums, gardening, and food.
Et Tu , Jul 17 2021 13:07 utc | 18This is precisely the type of arrogance that has led to US leaving Afghanistan with their pants down - having spent untold Trillions of dollars and having nothing to show for it. And soon, leaving Iraq and Syria too. It reminds me of how the US left Vietnam and Cambodia.
The 'White' establishment in Washington and across the US military industrial complex, has an air of superiority and always seem to feel that they can subjugate via throwing money at people! This in effect turns everyone they deal with into Whores (yes, prostitutes). Its fundamentally humiliating, and sews the seeds of corruption - both economic and moral. Then, they are shocked that there's a back clash!
The Taliban succeeded not with arms - but by projecting a completely different narrative of "Morality (i.e. non-corruption), honor, and even intermingled nationalism with their narrative". They projected a story that suggested that new Afghan daughters would not turn into Britney Spears or porn stars.
And, believe it or not, the Chinese see themselves as having been fundamentally humiliated by the West and couch their efforts as a struggle for their civilization (its not ideological or even economic) - they are fighting for honor and respect.
Western Civilization (and western elite) on the left and right are fundamentally materialistic. They worship money, and simply don't understand it when others don't. When they talk about superiority, they are basically saying the worship of money rules supreme. You sort of become dignified in the west if you have a lot of wealth. They want to turn the whole world into prostitutes. Policy and laws are driven by material considerations.
Now, I am not saying that spirituality or religion is good; and in fact, the Chinese are not driven by religious zeal (they are, on the whole, non-religious). What I am saying is that - no matter how its expressed - be it through religion, through culture, through rhetoric, etc. - all this back clash is really a struggle for respect, 'honor' and thus a push back to Western Arrogance, and the humiliation it has caused. The West simply doesn't understand that there are societies - especially in the east, that value honor over other things.
When Trump calls other people losers, he is basically saying he is richer, they are poorer. In his mind, winning, is all about money. When people write articles about the superiority of a civilization - they are implicitly putting other people down. That's not just arrogant, its rude and disrespectful. Its basically like a teenager judging their parents. How dare a newly formed nation (the US), judge or differentiate or even pretend to be superior to the Chinese, Persians etc.?
Our foreign policy (and rhetoric) in the West has to completely change. We have to be really careful, because, (honestly), it won't be very long before these other (inferior) civilizations actually take over global leadership. Then how will we want to be treated? Don't for a second think these folks can't build great gadgets that go to Mars! Oh, did China just do that? Does Iran have a space program? Did they just make their own vaccines? Once they start trading among themselves without using the USD greenback, we are finished.
We need them, they don't need us.
Petri Krohn , Jul 17 2021 14:05 utc | 26Some notable recent achievements of 'civilised' nations include:
-Illegal invasion and bombing of multiple non-aggressor nations
-Overthrowing of democratically elected Governments
-Support of extremist and oppressive regimes
-Sponsoring of terrorism, including weapon sales to ISIS
-Corruption of once trusted institutions like the UN and OPCWOh, the civility...
Billb , Jul 17 2021 14:15 utc | 28HOW DID RUSSIA BECOME THE ENEMY?
...when all she did was offer slight resistance to Western aggression? The key event was the August 2013 false-flag gas attack and massacre of hostages in Ghouta in Damascus.
What really angered the West was the Russian fleet in the Mediterranean that prevented the NATO attack on Syria. (You will not find a single word of this in Western media.) This is why Crimea needed to be captured by the West. As revenge and deterrence against the Russian agression.
I wrote about these events in 2016:
The standoff was first described by Israel Shamir in October 2013:
"The most dramatic event of September 2013 was the high-noon stand-off near the Levantine shore, with five US destroyers pointing their Tomahawks towards Damascus and facing them - the Russian flotilla of eleven ships led by the carrier-killer Missile Cruiser Moskva and supported by Chinese warships.Apparently, two missiles were launched towards the Syrian coast, and both failed to reach their destination."
A longer description was published by Australianvoice in 2015:
"So why didn't the US and France attack Syria? It seems obvious that the Russians and Chinese simply explained that an attack on Syria by US and French forces would be met by a Russian/Chinese attack on US and French warships. Obama wisely decided not to start WW III in September 2013." Can Russia Block Regime Change In Syria Again?In my own comments from 2013 I tried to understand the mission of the Russian fleet. This is what I believed Putin's orders to the fleet were:
- To sink any NATO ship involved in illegal aggression against Syria.
- You have the authority to use tactical nuclear weapons in self-defense.
I am sure NATO admirals understood the situation the same way. I am not sure of the American leadership in Washington.
Petri Krohn , Jul 17 2021 14:44 utc | 33Insulting language aside, the narrative they are trying to create is that there is an anti-Russia, anti-China trend developing and that those sitting on the fence would be wise to join the bandwagon.
This will be particularly effective on the majority of folks who barely scan headlines and skim articles. Falun Gong/CIA mouthpiece Epoch Times is on board with this, based on recent headlines.
Andres , Jul 17 2021 14:58 utc | 35Democracy grows in darkness
Wikipedia has a list of reliable and unreliable sources . "Reliable" are those sources that are under the direct control of the US regime. Any degree of independence from the regime makes the source "unreliable." WaPo and NYT are at the top of the list of reliable sources.
This is the diametric opposite of how Wikispooks defines reliability. Reliability of sources is directly proportional to their distance *from* power.
At A Closer Look on Syria (ACLOS) we only trust primary sources.
Civilization vs Uncivilizationlysias , Jul 17 2021 15:10 utc | 36Makes me remember the cornerstone work from former Argentine president DF Sarmiento, who dealt with "Civilization or Barbarism" in his book "Facundo". Of course, his position was the "civilized" one.
Those "civilized" succeeded in creating a country submitted to the British rule, selling cheap crops and getting expensive manufactures, with a privileged minority living lavishly and a great majority, in misery.
Also, their "civilized" methods to impose their project was the bloody "Police War"
Same language used now, for the same undisclosed intentions.
In Russian, to be uncivilized (nekulturny) is a bad thing.Mar man , Jul 17 2021 16:14 utc | 44librul , Jul 17 2021 17:04 utc | 55This article is fundamentally about propaganda and "soft power".
Soft power in foreign policy is usually defined when other countries defer to your judgement without threat of punishment or promise of gain.
In other words, if other countries support your country without a "carrot or stick" approach, you have soft power.
For years, the US simply assumed other "civilized" of the western world would dutifully follow along in US footsteps due to unshakeable trust in America's moral authority. The western media played a crucial role by suppressing news regarding any atrocities the western powers committed and amplifying any perceived threats or aggressions from "enemies".
Now, with the age of the internet, western audiences can read news from all over the world and that has been a catastrophe for western powers. We can now see real-time debunking of propaganda.
In the past, the British would have easily passed off the recent destroyer provocation as pure Russian aggression and could expect outrage from all western aligned countries. The EU and US populations could have easily been whipped into a frenzy and DEMANDED reprisals against Russia if not outright war. Something similar to a "Gulf of Tonkin" moment.
But, that did not happen. People all over the world now know NOTHING from the US or British press is to be trusted. People also now know NATO routinely try to stir up trouble and provoke Russia.
So, Americans and even British citizens displayed no widespread outrage because they simply did not believe their own government's and compliant media's side of the story.
US and British "soft power" are long gone. No one trusts them. No one wants to follow them into anymore disastrous wars of aggression.
Western media still do not understand this and cannot figure out why so many refuse western vaccines or support the newest color revolutions.
We simply do not believe it.
fx , Jul 17 2021 19:01 utc | 68This site appears to be the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/deceiving-the-public
They cast Germany as a victim or potential victim of foreign aggressors, as a peace-loving nation forced to take up arms to protect its populace or defend European civilization against Communism.I remember a tv history program that had interviews with German soldiers.
I recall one who had seen/participated in going from village to village in the USSR
hanging local communist leaders. He said they had been taught that by doing this
they were "protecting civilization".Max , Jul 17 2021 19:48 utc | 72Arrogance is not a deadly disease or even a hindrance for mainstream presstitutes; it is a job qualification, making them all the more manipulable and manipulative. And so, as with Michael Gordon, Judith Miller, Brett Stephens and David Sanger (essentially all of them pulling double duty for the apartheid state), people will die from their propaganda, but they will advance.
Tuyzentfloot , Jul 17 2021 21:08 utc | 78Name a democracy that isn't a suzerainty.
Name a leader with moral courage and integrity among suzerainties (private plantations). Nations without integrity and filled with Orcs (individuals without conscience), can't be civilized. They're EVIL vassals of Saruman & Sauron, manipulated by Wormtongue.
"The true equation is 'democracy' = government by world financiers."
– J.R.R. TolkienHenry Kissinger, in his interview with Chatham House stated, "the United States is in a CRISIS of confidence... America has committed great moral wrongs." What are U$A's core values?
According to a CFR member :
"How lucky I am that my mother studied with JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis and WH Auden and that she passed on to me a command of language that permits me to "tell the story" of the world economy in plain English. She would have been delighted that I managed to show that the evil Gollum from Tolkien's tales lives above the doorway in the Oval Office, which he certainly does. I saw him there myself. He may have found a new perch over at The Federal Reserve Bank as well."
– Excerpt From, Signals: The Breakdown of the Social Contract and the Rise of Geopolitics by Dr Philippa MalmgrenThe Financial Empire has ran out of LUCK. "In God We Trust"
Why Mordor Failed... Sauron's hegemonic collapse holds potent lessons
"A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims but accomplices."
Erelis , Jul 17 2021 21:27 utc | 79I thought moral superiority was the official position of NATO. The explicit intent is to weaponize human rights and democracy . So it is not merely the mundane 'our group is better' or the somewhat nostalgic western form of moral superiority, it's weaponized moral superiority.
Rob , Jul 17 2021 22:41 utc | 83George Will looking good I tellya. Anybody know who does his embalming?
Doesn't Will's article reek of Nazi propaganda against the Russians as a mongrel Asiatic uncivilized people? Of course to attack the Chinese as uncivilized? China uncivilized? 5,000 years of continuous culture? The Russians and Chinese must join up with civilization. Unfortunately at least in the West race is only about skin color. It certainly wasn't the case with the original Nazis. Will's piece is blatantly racist out of the tradition of Nazism.
circumspect , Jul 18 2021 1:38 utc | 88American exceptionalism's finest spokesman -- George F. Will
Tom_Q_Collins , Jul 18 2021 5:00 utc | 95Oxford and the Ivy League. The training grounds for the Anglo American deep state and the cheerleaders of the empire. Expect nothing more of these deeply under educated sudo intellectuals.
Tom_Q_Collins , Jul 18 2021 5:03 utc | 96Posted by: Ayatoilet | Jul 17 2021 12:50 utc | 16
Plenty of people who work for the MIC and in various policy circles/think tanks have plenty "to show for it" where all these wars are concerned. Many billions of dollars were siphoned upwards and outwards into the bank accounts and expensive homes of the managerial and executive classes (even the hazard pay folks who actually went to the places "we" were bombing) not just at Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Booz Allen, etc. but plenty of lesser known "socioeconomically disadvantaged" Small Businesses (proper noun in this context) companies who utilized the services of an army of consultants to glom onto the war machine. In most cases of the larger firms, Wall Street handled the IPOs long ago, and these companies have entire (much less profitable) divisions dedicated to state and local governments to "diversify" their business portfolios in case the people finally get sick of war. But that rarely happens in any real sense because the corporate establishment "legacy media" makes sure that there's always an uncivilized country to bomb or threaten....and that means the "defense" department needs loads of services, weapons, and process improvement consultants all the time. War is a racket; always has been, always will be.
Constantine , Jul 18 2021 7:33 utc | 98In what ways is the USA like Darth Vader's Galactic Empire in Star Wars?
Posted by: Mar man | Jul 17 2021 16:14 utc | 44Bemildred , Jul 18 2021 7:48 utc | 99Unfortunately, it seems that truly large segments of the population in the developed western countries and especially in the Anglo-sphere believe the propaganda emanating from the imperial mouthpieces. The US citizenry is a case study in manipulating the public.
Indeed, the DNC liberals are effectively the vanguard of the pro-war movement, espouse racist Rusophobia and conitnue Trump's hostility to China. The so-cslled conservatives follow their own tradition of imperial mobilization behind the Washington regime: Chin,Latin America, the very people who berated the 'Deep State' now paise its subversive activities against the targeted left-wing governments.
As for the moribund left - it would be better described as leftovers - it is often taken for a ride as long as the imperial messaging is promoted by the liberal media. The excuses for imperialism are a constant for many of them (even as they call themselves anti-imperialists) and the beleaguered voicesfor the truth are far and few. The latter often face silencing campaigns not just from the establishment hacks, but from their own supposed ideological comrades, who are, of course, in truth nothing of the sort.
All in all, despite the consistent record of manipulative propaganda and utter criminality the imperial regime never loses the support of the critical masss of the citizenry.
All in all, despite the consistent record of manipulative propaganda and utter criminality the imperial regime never loses the support of the critical masss of the citizenry.Posted by: Constantine | Jul 18 2021 7:33 utc | 98
Maybe 50% of the people here bother to vote, in IMPORTANT elections. Can be a lot less if the election is not important. The only people still engaged politically here at all are the people with good jobs. The American people have given up. And there are a lot of angry people running around, with guns. Claiming the citizenry here support the government is imperial propaganda. Why do you think they like mercenaries and proxies so much? And this is all in great contrast to when I was young 50 years ago.
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Jun 22, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,
In the later years of an abusive relationship I was in, my abuser had become so confident in how mentally caged he had me that he'd start overtly telling me what he is and what he was doing. He flat-out told me he was a sociopath and a manipulator, trusting that I was so submitted to his will by that point that I'd gaslight myself into reframing those statements in a sympathetic light. Toward the end one time he told me "I am going to rape you," and then he did, and then he talked about it to some friends trusting that I'd run perception management on it for him.
The better he got at psychologically twisting me up in knots and the more submitted I became, the more open he'd be about it. He seemed to enjoy doing this, taking a kind of exhibitionistic delight in showing off his accomplishments at crushing me as a person, both to others and to me. Like it was his art, and he wanted it to have an audience to appreciate it.
Close 168.1K Pfizer CEO on mRNA Vaccine Creation, R&D, Drug CostsI was reminded of this while watching a recent Fox News appearance by Glenn Greenwald where he made an observation we've discussed here previously about the way the CIA used to have to infiltrate the media, but now just openly has US intelligence veterans in mainstream media punditry positions managing public perception.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/jU58mrEpPvU
"If you go and Google, and I hope your viewers do, Operation Mockingbird, what you will find is that during the Cold War these agencies used to plot how to clandestinely manipulate the news media to disseminate propaganda to the American population," Greenwald said .
"They used to try to do it secretly. They don't even do it secretly anymore. They don't need Operation Mockingbird. They literally put John Brennan who works for NBC and James Clapper who works for CNN and tons of FBI agents right on the payroll of these news organizations. They now shape the news openly to manipulate and to deceive the American population."
In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled " The CIA and the Media " reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America's most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird . It was a major scandal, and rightly so. The news media are meant to report truthfully about what happens in the world, not manipulate public perception to suit the agendas of spooks and warmongers.
Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and the public is too brainwashed and gaslit to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like The New York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo which is then spun as fact by cable news pundits . The sole owner of The Washington Post is a CIA contractor , and WaPo has never once disclosed this conflict of interest when reporting on US intelligence agencies per standard journalistic protocol. Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona, as are known CIA assets like NBC's Ken Dilanian, as are CIA interns like Anderson Cooper and CIA applicants like Tucker Carlson.
They're just rubbing it in our faces now. Like they're showing off.
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X2VtYmVkX2NsaWNrYWJpbGl0eV8xMjEwMiI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250cm9sIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=879036821954539520&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fso-much-what-cia-used-do-covertly-it-now-does-overtly&sessionId=f90acd7ceb3bc7675f43696376e59f5ebdc79571&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px
And that's just the media. We also see this flaunting behavior exhibited in the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a propaganda operation geared at sabotaging foreign governments not aligned with the US which according to its own founding officials was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly. The late author and commentator William Blum makes this clear :
[I]n 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to "support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts". Notice the "nongovernmental"" part of the image, part of the myth. In actuality, virtually every penny of its funding comes from the federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to itself as an NGO (Non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO.
"We should not have to do this kind of work covertly," said Carl Gershman in 1986, while he was president of the Endowment. "It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the C.I.A. We saw that in the 60's, and that's why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that's why the endowment was created."
And Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."
In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.
We see NED's fingerprints all over pretty much any situation where the western power alliance needs to manage public perception about a CIA-targeted government, from Russia to Hong Kong to Xinjiang to the imperial propaganda operation known as Bellingcat.
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X2VtYmVkX2NsaWNrYWJpbGl0eV8xMjEwMiI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250cm9sIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1278456656305643521&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fso-much-what-cia-used-do-covertly-it-now-does-overtly&sessionId=f90acd7ceb3bc7675f43696376e59f5ebdc79571&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-2&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X2VtYmVkX2NsaWNrYWJpbGl0eV8xMjEwMiI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250cm9sIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1337063301113581568&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fso-much-what-cia-used-do-covertly-it-now-does-overtly&sessionId=f90acd7ceb3bc7675f43696376e59f5ebdc79571&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px
Hell, intelligence insiders are just openly running for office now. In an article titled " The CIA Democrats in the 2020 elections ", World Socialist Website documented the many veterans of the US intelligence cartel who ran in elections across America in 2018 and 2020:
"In the course of the 2018 elections, a large group of former military-intelligence operatives entered capitalist politics as candidates seeking the Democratic Party nomination in 50 congressional seats" nearly half the seats where the Democrats were targeting Republican incumbents or open seats created by Republican retirements. Some 30 of these candidates won primary contests and became the Democratic candidates in the November 2018 election, and 11 of them won the general election, more than one quarter of the 40 previously Republican-held seats captured by the Democrats as they took control of the House of Representatives. In 2020, the intervention of the CIA Democrats continues on what is arguably an equally significant scale."
So they're just getting more and more brazen the more confident they feel about how propaganda-addled and submissive the population has become. They're laying more and more of their cards on the table. Soon the CIA will just be openly selling narcotics door to door like Girl Scout cookies.
Or maybe not. I said my ex got more and more overt about his abuses in the later years of our relationship because those were the later years. I did eventually expand my own consciousness of my own inner workings enough to clear the fears and unexamined beliefs I had that he was using as hooks to manipulate me. Maybe, as humanity's consciousness continues to expand , the same will happen for the people and their abusive relationship with the CIA.
* * *
The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook , Twitter , Soundcloud or YouTube , or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi , Patreon or Paypal . If you want to read more you can buy my books . Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I've written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I'm trying to do with this platform, click here .
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Jun 23, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,
Late Stage Globalism Is A Tale of Narratives vs NetworksOver the past few weeks in my weekly #AxisOfEasy newsletter I've been covering how Big Tech and the corporate media tried, unsuccessfully, to keep a lid on the Wuhan Lab origin narrative. At one point I half-joked "I'll shut up about this when it's safe to talk about Ivermectin" . This week, I did end up writing a piece about Ivermectin, namely how doctors can't even mention it in their videos or podcast appearances without being penalized by social media platforms.
Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist who has studied bats (from which COVID-19 purportedly originated) was recently on Triggernometry , the UK based podcast that my company, easyDNS , has been sponsoring since mid-2020. It turns out that neither Weinstein nor Triggernometry can say the word "Ivermectin" in their shows. If they do they'll get an automatic takedown by YouTube and a strike on Facebook for violating community standards.
Matt Taibbi recently posed the question " Why has "˜Ivermectin' become a dirty word? " He cites Dr. Pierre Kory in his testimony to a US Senate Committee hearing on medical responses to COVID-19 in December 2020. Kory was referring to an existing medicine that was already FDA approved that he was describing as a "wonder drug" in treating COVID-19, that drug was Ivermectin.
This Senate testimony was televised and viewed by approximately 8 million people. YouTube removed the video of this exchange. They later suspended the account of the United States senator who invited Dr. Kory to speak. (Kory also appeared on Brett Weinstein's show and they took down that as well).
Associated Press for their part "fact checked" the senate testimony, and because, in their words "there is no evidence that Ivermectin is a "˜miracle drug' against COVID", they labeled it as false:
CLAIM: The antiparasitic drug ivermectin "has a miraculous effectiveness that obliterates" the transmission of COVID-19 and will prevent people from getting sick.
AP'S ASSESSMENT: False. There's no evidence ivermectin has been proven a safe or effective treatment against COVID-19.
... ... ...
But I'm looking beyond that, outside of network TV. The hottest news outlets are fast becoming independent journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald , self-publishing via their Substack. That's mainly email.
Joe Rogan has a larger audience than Rachel Maddow and Don Lemon combined. So too does Steve Bannon, btw. The few times I've been on his Warroom I was astounded at the reach of his audience. According to company sources he's doing between 2.5 and 3.5 million downloads per day. The last people I would ever expect to be tuning into Bannon are telling me "I saw you on Warroom". (It's mind-blowing).
Zerohedge has more traffic than Huffington Post, Vox, Vice, The Atlantic and pretty well any of the other bluecheck day camps for aspiring establishment shills.
It's because of independent, renegade journalists and people writing outside of major outlets that these stories are starting go mainstream despite the best efforts of Big Tech, enforcing whatever canon the corporate press deems to be truth, or the establishment anointed "fact checkers" who try to step in whenever something looks to gain traction:
The Wuhan lab origin was suspected for over a year (and the Fauci emails prove it). Zerohedge was on it almost immediately and got deplatformed for their troubles. It was finally pushed over the line in a Medium post by Nicholas Wade over a year later.
Ivermectin may be next round and it looks like if it gets anywhere it will be thanks to people like Matt Taibbi and Bret Weinstein.
What is the common thread here? It's the power of decentralized networks and open source protocols vs narrative control that is promulgated from global governments, amplified by the corporate media, and enforced by technocratic platforms.
... ... ...
It may seem like the censorship is absolute and that the narrative and the spin is overwhelming. But take solace that it only appears that way because the facade is breaking.
As more people realize that the centralized technocratic system is failing, those who's privilege and position are premised on it have to double down, triple down. They have to burn the boats.
They're fully committed now and because they have no other choice they have to overstep and overreach. Too much, too soon. Too late.
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Jun 20, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
The Democrats in Congress want comprehensive regulation of social media which will ultimately allow regime regulators to decide what is and what is not "disinformation." This has become very clear as Congress has held a series of Congressional hearings designed to pressure tech leaders into doing even more to silence critics of the regime and its preferred center-left narratives.
Back in February, for instance, Glen Greenwald reported:
For the third time in less than five months , the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms.
House Democrats have made no secret of their ultimate goal with this hearing: to exert control over the content on these online platforms. "Industry self-regulation has failed," they said, and therefore "we must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation." In other words, they intend to use state power to influence and coerce these companies to change which content they do and do not allow to be published.
(The February hearing wasn't even the end of it. Big Tech was summoned yet again on March 25 .)
Greenwald is probably right. The end game here is likely to create a permanent "partnership" between big tech in which government regulators will ultimately decide just how much these platforms will deplatform user and delete content that run afoul of the regime's messaging.
It might strike many readers as odd that this should even be necessary. It's already become quite clear that Big Social Media is hardly an enemy of mainstream proregime forces in Washington. Quite the opposite.
Jack Dorsey, for instance, is exactly the sort of partisan regime apparatchik one expects out of today's Silicon Valley. For example, during October of last year , Twitter locked down the account of the New York Post , because the Post reported a story on Hunter Biden that threatened to hurt Biden's chances for election. Over 90 percent of political donation money coming out of Facebook and Twitter goes to Democrats.
Yet, it's important to keep in mind that this isn't going to be enough to convince politicians to pack up and decide to leave social media companies alone. The regime is unlikely to be satisfied with anything other than full state control of social media through permanent regulatory bodies that can ultimately bring the industry to heel. Regardless of the ideological leanings of the industry players involved, they're likely to see the writing on the wall. As with any regime where the regulators and legislators hold immense power -- as is the case in Washington today -- the regime will generally be able to win the "cooperation" of industry leaders who will end up taking a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" position.
Silicon Valley Is Ideologically Allied with the Regime. But That's Not Enough.It's been abundantly clear for at least a decade that ideologically speaking, Silicon Valley is as politically mainstream as it gets. The old early-2000s notion that Silicon Valley harbors secret libertarian, antiestablishment leanings has been disproven dozens of times over.
Moreover, Washington has a long history of co-opting tech "geniuses" to serve the whims of the regime. Even back in 2013 Julian Assange already saw the "ever closer union" between government agents and Silicon Valley. Assange saw how federal agencies were hiring Silicon Valley workers as "consultants" and saw where the "partnership" was headed. He concluded "The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism."
But even if Silicon Valley is packed full of stooges for the NSA -- as appears to be the case -- this still doesn't mean that Silicon Valley firms are willing to happily hand over their property to the federal government. After all, Silicon Valley CEOs, managers, and stockholders are all still at least partly in it for the money. All else being equal, they prefer profit to loss, and they want freedom to make decisions free of regulatory control. They probably don't care about freedom in the abstract, but they care about it for themselves.
The Threat of Regulation Creates Support for the RegimeOn the other hand, once federal policymakers and regulators start making threats, the game changes entirely. All of a sudden, it makes a lot of sense to pursue "friendly" relations with the state as a matter of self-preservation. If Washington has the ability to destroy your business -- and if it has become impossible to "fly under the radar" -- then it makes a lot of sense to make Washington your friend.
Under these circumstances, there's little to be gained from blanket opposition to federal regulation, and a lot to be gained from embracing regulation while merely working to ensure that regulation benefits you and your friends.
Big Business versus Small BusinessSo, it should never surprise us when big business ultimately ends up siding with the regime. It would be folly not to, especially if one has the means to hire lobbyists, attorneys, and PR consultants which can help Big Business negotiate effectively with regulators. Needless to say, the outcomes of these negotiations are likely to end up helping the big players at the expense of smaller ones who aren't even present at the negotiating table.
For small firms that have little hope of influencing federal policy, it still makes sense to simply oppose federal activism altogether and hope for the best. But if your firm manages to get a seat "at the table" it's best to seize the opportunity. To quote an old saying among lobbyists: "if you're not at the table, you're on the menu."
But let us not forget that even when private firms can bring immense amounts of resources to bear for purposes of influencing public policy and negotiating with bureaucrats: the regime itself ultimately holds the advantage. No private firm in the world has the resources to ignore or veto the wishes of the regime's army of regulatory, prosecutors, and tax collectors. No private firm enjoys anything approaching the coercive monopoly power of the state.
But this doesn't mean those firms can't share in this power. And that's very often what happens. Faced with a "join us or be destroyed" ultimatum from federal regulators or lawmakers, most private firms choose the "join us" option. Of course, many smaller firms aren't even offered the choice.
Tillyoudrop 9 minutes ago (Edited)AriusArmenian 3 minutes ago remove linkWwwwrong.
BIG BUSINESS is the Regime, they own this fxxxing place, and they control you by the balls.
freedommusic 10 minutes agoAll the major social media companies in the US were funded and controlled by the CIA from startup.
There is not a future end-game - it has been the CIA's agenda from the beginning.
The CIA along with Watt Street and the MIC owns and controls the US from top to bottom - and they intend for the lumpen white people to fall on their swords. This is all to the interests of the rich and powerful button pushers. I pity the young people like idiots so easily used by the elites.
bunnyswanson 1 minute agoWell when DARPA, the DOD, CIA, et al, created your company what choice do you have?
What did you think this company is YOURS Mr Z?
We created LifeLog with The Peoples money, handed it over to you so there is plausible deniability, and are now weaponizing this data against the very people who have funded it.
Welcome to the MO of monolithic government.
Big Business is the regime. Unfair competition is the name of their game. Monopolizing their industry is their goal. Oversight committees should have stopped them but simple men who define themselves by what they own sell out eagerly.
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Jun 14, 2021 | www.mintpressnews.com
Reddit is one of the world's most influential news and social media platforms. The website attracted over 1.2 billion visits in April 2021 alone, making it the United States' eighth most visited site, ahead of other leviathans like Twitter, Instagram and eBay. Now majority-owned by a much larger corporate publishing empire, Reddit is also far ahead of more established news sites, garnering three times the numbers of Fox News and five times those of The New York Times .
That is why it was so surprising that so little was made of the company's decision to appoint foreign policy hawk Jessica Ashooh to the position of Director of Policy in 2017, at which time it was also the eight most visited site in the U.S. Ashooh, who had been a Middle East foreign policy wonk at NATO's think tank the Atlantic Council, was appointed at around the same time that the Senate Select Intelligence Committee was demanding more control over the popular website, on the grounds that it was being used to spread disinformation. In her role as Director of Policy, she oversees all government relations and public policy for the company, in addition to managing content, product and advertising. Yet a Google search for "Jessica Ashooh Reddit" filtered between late 2016 and early 2017 (after she was appointed) elicits zero relevant results, meaning not one media outlet even mentioned the questionable appointment.
This is all the more hair-raising, given her resume as a high state official -- all of which raises serious questions about the extent of collaboration between Silicon Valley and the national security state.
A hawk's talons on SyriaThe Atlantic Council is the de-facto brains of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and takes funding from the military alliance, as well as from the U.S. government, the U.S. military, Middle Eastern dictatorships, other Western governments, big tech companies, and weapons manufacturers. Its board of directors has been and continues to be a who's who of high U.S. statespeople like Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, as well as senior military commanders such as retired generals Wesley Clark, David Petraeus, H.R. McMaster, James "Mad Dog" Mattis, the late Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, and Admiral James Stavridis. At least seven former CIA directors are also on the board. As such, the council chooses to represent both political wings of the national security state.
Ashooh's LinkedIn resume epitomizes the troubling relantionship between think tanks and big tech
Between 2015 and 2017, Ashooh was Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council's Middle East Strategy Task Force, working directly with and under Madeline Albright and Stephen Hadley. This is particularly noteworthy, given both these individuals' roles in the region. As Bill Clinton's secretary of state, Albright oversaw the Iraq sanctions and the Oil for Food Program, denounced as "genocide" by the successive United Nations diplomats charged with carrying them out. In an infamous interview with 60 Minutes , Albright casually brushed off a question about her role in the killing of half a million children, stating "the price is worth it." Meanwhile, Hadley was deputy or senior national security advisor to the government of George W. Bush throughout the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, surely the greatest crimes against humanity thus far in the 21st century.
Ashooh appears to be as hawkish as her bosses. Her particular area of expertise is the war in Syria, regarding which she has been among the most belligerent voices, constantly calling for more American intervention to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad. In a 2015 interview with Al Jazeera , she praised the U.K. government's decision to bomb the country, claiming that the British public was "coming around" to the idea of war. A shocked interviewer asked "how will the British airstrikes [on] Syria make the British public any safer?" Ashooh replied that it was "generally a positive decision" because "it goes a long way in improving international consensus on the way forward on Syria," although she lamented that there wouldn't be "much improvement in the situation without ground troops." There will be "no political solution without a military element," she predicted, essentially making the pitch for war.
https://cdn.jwplayer.com/players/bhFBUukP-YuKiCfZc.html
Ashooh has also constantly praised and supported Syria's opposition forces. In 2016, she said that she was very happy that "fighters on the ground from a number of key factions" were uniting against the "Assad regime." She condemned Russia for claiming these opposition forces were members of terrorist groups like Al-Nusra, Jaysh al-Islam or ISIS, insisting that these were "moderate" rebels.Of course, the idea that there was still any measurable distance between "moderate" rebels and outright militant jihadists by 2016 was hard to maintain . Even The Washington Post by this time was admitting as much, noting that so-called moderates were now so "intermingled" with al-Nusra that it was difficult to tell them apart.
Nevertheless, the New Hampshire native took to the pages of The New York Times to demand that the U.S. arm the opposition. Of course, it was already doing so, the CIA spending $1 billion per year fielding rebel mercenary armies in the conflict -- with one in every 15 dollars the agency spent going to this endeavor. All of this Ashooh surely knew, yet she maintained that the West must continue to "jack up the price" of Russia defending Assad. "As long as [Assad] remains in power and remains the figurehead of the Syrian government this conflict won't end," she said , laying out her regime-change-or-bust position. Just weeks before unexpectedly taking over at Reddit, Ashooh seemed to still be in full foreign-policy-hawk mode, condemning Obama in the pages of The Washington Post for his apparent softness on Syria and demanding that Trump "restore U.S. credibility" by "order[ing] targeted, punitive strikes against the Assad regime."
Ashooh attends British Polo Day at Abu Dhabi's Ghantoot Racing and Polo Club. Photo | Ahlan Dirty war, dirty warrior
Ashooh is actually even more involved in the Syrian conflict than one might realize from her hawkish opinions alone. Between 2011 and 2015, she worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the United Arab Emirates, in her own words , "[p]rovid[ing] senior decision makers with policy analysis and strategic advice, with a particular focus on Syria."
At that time the UAE was using its enormous financial clout to arm and fund a myriad of jihadist groups attempting to overthow the secular strongman Assad and establish some kind of Islamic state. Far from a conspiracy theory, this comes straight from the horse's mouth, as then-Vice President Joe Biden revealed in a Q&A session in 2014. The future president frankly stated :
The Saudis, the Emiratis, what were they doing? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world. "
Under pressure, he later apologized for his loose lips.
MintPress News asked the Emirati Ministry of Foreign Affairs to comment on precisely what Ashooh's role was, but they failed to respond.
Ashooh is pictured during her time as a "consultant" in Iraqi Kurdistan. Photo | Academyalumni
Ashooh herself appears to have been a relatively major player in the Syrian Civil War. In her previously mentioned Washington Post article , she notes that her boss was a former Emirati Air Force General and that she was flown to Istanbul in 2013 to attend an emergency meeting with leaders of the Syrian opposition, as well as ambassadors from unnamed Arab and Western states, in order to plan a response to a reported chemical weapons attack and to help the U.S. "coordinate with the Syrian opposition."
At the same time as she was advising the nation on Middle Eastern affairs, the UAE was widely accused of flying ISIS and al-Qaeda leaders into Yemen to help them intensify the Saudi-led onslaught on the impoverished nation and of smuggling U.S.-made weaponry -- including small arms, TOW missiles and Oshkosh fighting vehicles -- to the jihadist groups. While Ashooh's writing is careful to maintain a distinction between the "moderate" rebels she supports and the fundamentalist radicals she does not, it certainly is noteworthy that the entities she worked for consistently seem to end up in league with the most regressive forces in the region. MintPress also reached out to Reddit for comment on why they appointed Ashooh, given her past history, and on the wider phenomenon of government penetration of social media. The company initially promised to issue a response to the inquiry but has not followed through with it.
An Unholy Alliance: Did the US-Backed UAE Fly ISIS Leaders into Yemen's Killing Fields? The US-allied United Arab Emirates (UAE stands accused of flying ISIS leaders from Syria into Yemen to use in the Saudi-led Coalition war.MintPress News | Alexander Rubinstein | Mar 6, 2019 Opposing some dictatorships, supporting others
Regime change is on the table for more than just one Middle Eastern nation. In a 2017 paper for the Center for the National Interest -- a think tank established by former Republican President Richard Nixon and the "Godfather of Neoconservatism," Irving Kristol -- Ashooh explores the different options for forcing regime change in Iran, but concludes that overthrowing the "odious regime" is an impossible task right now, and criticizes the idea as a quixotic dream.
Nevertheless, she is far from an Iran dove. An Atlantic Council report she co-wrote insists that "Iranian interference in the Arab world must be deterred," and that "America's friends and partners must be reassured that the U.S. opposes Iranian hegemony and will work with them to prevent it."
Ashooh's commitment to fighting against Middle Eastern dictatorships might seem more principled if she did not appear so enamored of the least democratic one of them all. In 2016, she accompanied Albright and Hadley to Saudi Arabia and praised the monarchy's dynamic leadership on the economy and its nurturing of a new generation. "It was really really exciting to see that level of energy and the level of government support for these young people who were interested in shaping their own futures it was just wonderful," she said . In an article about her experience for business news website Market Watch , she waxed lyrical about how forward-thinking the Saudi government is and how the country has become "a hub for the dynamic and positive change that is swelling up throughout the region." Presumably, this excludes Yemen, a nation they were bombing relentlessly . In a 2020 interview , Ashooh revealed that her dream job would be U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. One of her earliest comments on her public Reddit page (made before she began working there) is deflecting the Kingdom from criticism of its dreadful treatment of women.
Ashooh's Reddit account, which doesn't identify her real identity, uses the moniker, arabscarab
As part of the Atlantic Council, Ashooh was tasked with envisaging a new Middle East for the 21st century. Given her output , it seems that she advocates for a transition towards a more privatized, free-market economic setup, not completely unlike the shock therapy tried in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. "We have to "encourage states to make the reforms that move economies from state-based to ones that support entrepreneurship, because the age of state-based economies is over," she said at a talk at New York University in 2015, adding:
You've got to move to support entrepreneurship in the region and let people take advantage of the natural industrial tendencies of people in the Middle East. My God, if you've ever been to a Turkish bazaar or a market in Cairo you know that these countries are perfectly capable of having functioning market economies. But the state has gotten in the way.
Ashooh's LinkedIn profile also notes that in 2010, she worked as an advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Planning "on a variety of strategic and economic development issues," but does not go into any more detail about what those issues were. A further biography merely states that her consultancy agency "provid[ed] strategic and management consulting services to the Ministry of Planning of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Northern Iraq." Unsurprisingly, the organization has links to the U.S. military; the agency's lead partner being a former Army captain.
Think TankieAshooh comes from a relatively prominent New Hampshire family of Lebanese descent, the most notable of which is probably her uncle Richard . Richard Ashooh was Donald Trump's Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Administration and a former executive at weapons manufacturer BAE Systems. Unlike her uncle, Jessica appears to lean more Democratic, having donated money to a number of local politicians, as well as to anti-Trump Republican groups aimed at convincing them to vote blue, such as Right Side PAC and the now infamous Lincoln Project. However, she also appears to have great respect for many Republicans, having written her doctoral thesis at Oxford University on the Middle East policy of the George W. Bush administration. She also stated that the person she would have most liked to have met was 41st President George Bush Senior, describing him as possessing "incredible amounts of strategy, finesse and restraint." Thus, her political views appear to be exactly in the center of the neoliberal " blob " in Washington.
Ashooh also worked for the right-wing think tank the CATO Institute and is a Term Member of the more Democratic-aligned Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR's term member program is intended to, in its own words, "cultivate the next generation of foreign policy leaders."
Surveillance ValleyHow and why, then, did a hawkish young mandarin hothoused at elite universities and in the halls of state power end up an executive at an anarchic messageboard site with an anti-establishment reputation? Virtually everyone else in senior roles at Reddit has relevant backgrounds in marketing or tech, having worked with comparable companies such as Yelp, Expedia and Snapchat.
Tom Secker -- a journalist, podcaster and researcher who runs SpyCulture.com , an online archive about government involvement in the entertainment industry -- was deeply skeptical. "That someone whose entire career has been in international relations and foreign affairs is now the senior policy wonk at Reddit is simply bizarre. Given her ties to the CFR, Atlantic Council and the like, it's downright suspicious," Secker told MintPress .
Underneath the surface, however, the Atlantic Council has been rapidly expanding its influence and control over big social media companies. In 2018, it announced that it would be partnering with Facebook to promote trustworthy sources and derank, demote and even delete low quality or fake news, thus effectively curating what the platform's 2.85 billion worldwide users see in their news feeds. But the effect of recent algorithmic changes has been to throttle alternative media traffic in favor of establishment sources such as CNN , Fox News and The New York Times . Even such more mainstream liberal sites as Mother Jones have seen their numbers crater. Facebook later admitted that they were directly targeting Mother Jones because of its left-leaning content, raising the question that if such a middle-of-the-road liberal outlet was being penalized, wasn't the collapse in traffic to more radical publications surely deliberate? Given the Atlantic Council's funding and the identities of those on its board , their control over social media is tantamount to state censorship on a global level.
Earlier this year, Facebook also hired NATO press officer Ben Nimmo to be its intelligence chief, in another move that dismayed free-speech advocates. In the past, Nimmo has identified a Welsh pensioner and an internationally known Ukranian pianist as Russian bots, raising more questions about the suitability of the Atlantic Council to be an arbiter of truth online.
The Facebook-Atlantic Council link mirrors that of Microsoft with NewsGuard , a new piece of software purportedly trying to fight fake news by placing either green shields or red warning logos, corresponding to an outlet's credibility, beside all links in its browser, Microsoft Edge -- this credibility being decided entirely by NewsGuard itself. Newsguard pushed Microsoft to install the software on all its products as standard. Again, however, NewsGuard's system rated establishment websites like Fox News and CNN as trustworthy but independent media as suspect. And again, a glance at its advisory board makes it clear that this is a state operation. Those in key positions included George W. Bush's Secretary of Homeland Security and former NSA and CIA Director General Michael Hayden; ex-White House Communications Director Don Baer; and former Secretary General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Worse still, NewsGuard is also linked to a PR agency employed in whitewashing the Saudi government's human-rights record and its role in the carnage in Yemen.
Twitter, too, has some extremely troubling links with state power. In 2019 Gordon MacMillan, a senior Twitter executive responsible for the Middle East region, was outed as an active duty officer in the British Army's 77th Brigade, a unit dedicated to online operations and psychological warfare. Far from causing a scandal, only one major U.S. outlet even mentioned the story, and the journalist in question resigned from the profession weeks later, claiming the existence of a network of top-down state censors who quash stories that threaten the power and prestige of the national security state. To this day, MacMillan remains in his post at Twitter, strongly suggesting the social media company knew of his role before he was hired.
Over the past few years, Twitter, Reddit and Facebook have announced the deletion of hundreds of thousands of accounts linked to sources in Russia, Iran, China and other enemy states, often on the recommendation of Western governments or state-sponsored intelligence organizations. However, they never seem willing or able to find any manipulation of their platforms by Western governments. Thus, the upshot of this has been to slowly dissuade critics of Western foreign policy from using their services.
"The mainstream media-politik establishment has managed to get a hold over Twitter, Facebook and Instagram -- shadow-banning and downrating posts considered 'Russian propaganda' or whatever other excuse they use to marginalize perspectives and content outside of the mainstream," Secker told MintPress . "Audiences for this sort of content are increasingly pissed off and alienated by the major social media sites."
Facebook, Social Media Giants Admit to Silencing Palestinian Voices Online Social media companies including Facebook have admitted to MintPress that pro-Palestinian posts were removed, blaming mistakes in the algorithm.Increasingly, unwelcome political voices are either brushed off by centrist pundits as repeating Russian talking points or smeared as being amplified by Kremlin-based bot farms. The popularity of movements on the left like Black Lives Matter or the Bernie Sanders' campaign were written off as partially linked to Russia, while others suggested that the January 6 insurrection in Washington was essentially a Russian operation.
The irony is that many of the wildest accusations against Putin that have fed this climate of suspicion began life in Atlantic Council documents. For example, the organization has published a series of studies that suggest that virtually every European political party challenging the neoliberal status quo in some way -- from Labour and UKIP in the U.K. to Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece and PODEMOS and Vox in Spain -- are secretly controlled by Russia, functioning as the "Kremlin's Trojan Horses," in its words.
The Atlantic Council is also deeply intertwined with a U.K. government-funded organization called the Integrity Initiative, something that purports to be a group defending democracy from disinformation. However, in practice, it appears to be doing the opposite: planting disinformation about politicians' supposed links to Russia in order to undermine them. The Integrity Initiative is a government-backed cluster of journalists who operate in unison to conduct propaganda blitzes on unsuspecting publics. In 2018, it launched a successful operation to prevent Colonel Pedro Baños being appointed Spain's head of national security. Considering Baños too soft on Russia for the Atlantic Council and other hawks' liking, the initiative sprung into action, creating a storm of protest that led to another individual being chosen.
New Documents Reveal Covert UK Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In US Politics With the help of John Rendon and the State Department's Global Engagement Center, the Integrity Initiative brings its disinformation campaign to the US.Reddit actually played a key role in a 2019 propaganda blitz against anti-war Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. A few days before the U.K.'s general election, Corbyn promoted documents leaked on the platform that showed that Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson was negotiating with American companies, putting much of the country's National Health Service up for sale. With just days to go before polls opened, it could have proved a game changer. Reddit quickly came to Johnson's rescue, however, asserting that the documents were part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The story in the pliant British press switched from "Boris Johnson is selling off the NHS" to "Corbyn promotes Russian disinfo," thus greasing the skids for an easy victory for the hardline anti-Russia Conservative Party, an outcome the hawks at the Atlantic Council were no doubt relieved by, given Corbyn's open skepticism about war, empire and nuclear weapons. The veracity of the documents was not challenged.
For a whileFounded in 2005, Reddit has grown to become one of the world's largest and most influential websites. However, it began life as an anarchistic messageboard whose culture was profoundly libertarian and anti-establishment. For years, the company's administrators took a near free speech absolutist position. Aaron Swartz, Reddit's co-founder, was an open source hacktivist and even attempted to download and publish the entirety of academic publisher Jstor's library. When authorities got wind of what he was doing, they threatened him with 40 years in prison, an action that caused him to take his own life in 2013.
Reddit's own position on free information and free speech was often so extreme it caused huge controversy. The site became the internet's largest source of child pornography. It was only after CNN began reporting on it to a nationwide audience that things began to change. Other, grossly offensive communities like /r/BeatingWomen and /r/CoonTown were also protected.
Nevertheless, the culture established by anarchistic tech bros remained for some years, with the site resembling darker corners of the internet like 4Chan and 8Chan as much as more family-friendly mainstream social media like Facebook.
Ashooh's arrival in 2017 coincided with a new era in the site's history. Gone were the days of protecting communities that would bring in bad publicity. Her team quickly brought in a new content policy and began to delete communities that violated it. Last year, she oversaw the banning of over 2,000 communities in a single day, including /r/The_Donald, the main Donald Trump subreddit, and /r/ChapoTrapHouse, the most active left-wing community. These decisions have helped the money flow in; since 2017 revenue has more than tripled .
However, what has been lost across the internet is the liberatory potential of these technologies. In the 1990s and 2000s, many predicted that the internet would usher in a new era of egalitarianism and genuine democracy, helping even to reduce barriers and tensions between nations. For a while, the new medium allowed political actors to challenge the status quo and gain huge followings quickly. Alternative media was easily outperforming legacy media, and challenging the status quo when it came to news. Seeing that, the reaction since 2016 has been swift, as the elite have moved to retighten their grip over the means of communication. Ashooh's jump from national security state official to Reddit Director of Policy is just one more point of reference on that chart.
Feature photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent , as well as a number of academic articles . He has also contributed to FAIR.org , The Guardian , Salon , The Grayzone , Jacobin Magazine , and Common Dreams .
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May 30, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Zapekk , May 30 2021 23:11 utc | 24
Sources for Danmarks Radio: The USA has spied on Norwegian politicians from Denmark
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&tl=en&u=https://nrkbeta.no/2021/05/30/kilder-til-danmarks-radio-usa-har-spionert-pa-norske-politikere-fra-danmark/ A top-secret investigation called "Operation Dunhammer" was the start of the Danish intelligence scandal, say sources to Danmarks Radio.
Through a collaboration with Danish intelligence, the United States has conducted targeted espionage against senior politicians and officials in Norway, Sweden, Germany and France. That was one of the conclusions in an explosive report made by four employees of the Danish intelligence service (FE), according to Danmarks Radio (DR).
NRK mentions the Danish public broadcaster's findings as part of an international collaboration with Danmarks Radio, SVT, NDR, WDR, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Le Monde.
Over several months, DR has met nine people with access to classified information from the intelligence service. All information in the case has been confirmed to DR by at least two, often several, independent sources.
Last year, NRK reported that the Danish-American spy cooperation was aimed at targets in Norway, but it was then unknown who the surveillance was aimed at. The new information indicates that the extent of espionage against Norway was far greater than previously known.
NRK and DR do not know which Norwegian politicians and officials have been subjected to targeted espionage, but as one of DR's sources says:
- It would not have been interesting for an intelligence service to spy on municipal politicians.
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May 22, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
There are reasons to be skeptical. After decades of stonewalling on the issue, suddenly American military chiefs appear to be giving credence to claims of UFOs invading Earth.
Several viral video clips purporting to show extraordinary flying technology have been "confirmed" by the Pentagon as authentic. The Pentagon move is unprecedented.
The videos of the Unidentified Flying Objects were taken by U.S. air force flight crews or by naval surveillance and subsequently "leaked" to the public. The question is: were the "leaks" authorized by Pentagon spooks to stoke the public imagination of visitors from space? The Pentagon doesn't actually say what it believes the UFOs are, only that the videos are "authentic".
A Senate intelligence committee is to receive a report from the Department of Defense's Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force next month. That has also raised public interest in the possibility of alien life breaching our skies equipped with physics-defying technology far superior to existing supersonic jets and surveillance systems.
Several other questions come to mind that beg skepticism. Why does the phenomenon of UFOs or UAP only seem to be associated with the American military? This goes back decades to the speculation during the 1950s about aliens crashing at Roswell in New Mexico. Why is it that only the American military seems privy to such strange encounters? Why not the Russian or Chinese military which would have comparable detection technology to the Americans but they don't seem to have made any public disclosures on alien encounters? Such a discrepancy is implausible unless we believe that life-forms from lightyears away have a fixation solely on the United States. That's intergalactic American "exceptionalism" for you!
Also, the alleged sightings of UFOs invariably are associated with U.S. military training grounds or high-security areas.
Moreover, the released videos that have spurred renewed public interest in UFOs are always suspiciously of poor quality, grainy and low resolution. Several researchers, such as Mick West, have cogently debunked the videos as optical illusions. That's not to say that the U.S. air force or naval personnel were fabricating the images. They may genuinely believe that they were witnessing something extraordinary. But as rational optics experts have pointed out there are mundane explanations for seeming unusual aerial observations, such as drones or balloons drifting at high speed in differential wind conditions, or by the crew mistaking a far-off aircraft dipping over the horizon for an object they believe to be much closer.
The military people who take the videos in good – albeit misplaced – faith about what they are witnessing are not the same as the military or intelligence people who see an opportunity with the videos to exploit the public in a psychological operation.
Fomenting public anxieties, or even just curiosity, about aliens and super-technology is an expedient way to exert control over the population. At a time when governing authorities are being questioned by a distrustful public and when military-intelligence establishments are viewed as having lost a sense of purpose, what better way to realign public respect by getting them to fret over alien marauders from whom they need protection?
There is here a close analogy to the way foreign nations are portrayed as adversaries and enemies in order to marshal public support or least deference to the governing establishment and its military. We see this ploy played over and over again with regard to the U.S. and Western demonization of Russia and China as somehow conveying a malign intent towards Western societies. In other words, it's a case of Cold War and UFOs from the same ideological launchpad, so to speak, in order to distract public attention from internal problems.
However, more worrying still is that there is a dangerous reinforcing crossover of the two propaganda realms. The fueling of UFO speculation is feeding directly into speculation that U.S. airspace is being invaded by high-tech weapons developed by Russia or China.
U.S. lawmakers are demanding answers from the Pentagon about whether the aerial "encounters" are advanced weaponry from foreign enemies who are surveilling the American homeland at will. Some U.S. air force aviators have recently expressed to the media a feeling of helplessness in the face of seeming superior technology.
At a time of heightened animosity towards Russia and China and febrile talk among Pentagon chiefs about the possibility of all-out war, it is not difficult to imagine, indeed it is disturbingly easy to imagine, how optical illusions about alien phenomena could trigger false alarms attributed to Russian or Chinese military incursions.
The stoking of UFO controversy appears to be a classic psyops perpetrated by U.S. military intelligence for the objective of population control. Its aim is to corral the citizenry under the authority of the state and for them to accept the protector function of "our" military. The big trouble is that the psyops with aliens are, in turn, risking the exacerbation of fears and tensions with Russia and China.
With all the Pentagon-assisted chatter, it is more likely that an F-18 squadron could mistake an errant weather balloon on the horizon for an alien spacecraft. And amid our new Cold War tensions, it is but a small conceptual step to further imagine that the UFO is not from outer space but rather is a Russian or Chinese hypersonic cruise missile heading towards the U.S. mainland.
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May 24, 2021 | www.realclearinvestigations.com
By Aaron Maté , RealClearInvestigations
May 19, 2021The man cast as a linchpin of debunked Trump-Russia collusion theories is breaking his silence to vigorously dispute the U.S. government's effort to brand him a Russian spy and put him behind bars.
In an exclusive interview with RealClearInvestigations, Konstantin Kilimnik stated, "I have no relationship whatsoever to any intelligence services, be they Russian or Ukrainian or American, or anyone else."
Konstantin Kilimnik: Decries the U.S. government's "senseless and false accusations." AP PhotoKilimnik, a longtime employee of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, spoke out in response to an explosive Treasury Department statement declaring that he had "provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy" during the 2016 election. That press release, which announced an array of sanctions on Russian nationals last month, also alleged that Kilimnik is a "known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf."
Treasury 's claim came shortly after two other accusatory U.S. government statements about the dual Ukrainian-Russian national. In March, a U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment accused Kilimnik of being a "Russian influence agent" who meddled in the 2020 campaign to assist Trump's reelection. A month earlier, an FBI alert offered $250,000 for information leading to his arrest over a 2018 witness tampering charge in Manafort's shuttered Ukraine lobbying case, which was unrelated to Russia, collusion, or any elections.
Treasury provided no evidence for its claims, which go beyond the findings of the two most extensive Russiagate investigations: the 448-page report issued in 2019 by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the 966-page report issued in August 2020 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Treasury has declined all media requests for elaboration on how it reached conclusions that those probes did not. Two unidentified officials told NBC News that U.S. intelligence "has developed new information" about Kilimnik "that leads them to believe " (emphasis added) that he passed on the polling data to Russia. But these sources "did not identify the source or type of intelligence that had been developed," nor "when or how" it was received.
"Nobody has seen any evidence to support these claims about Kilimnik," a congressional source familiar with the House and Senate's multiple Russia-related investigations told RCI.
Adam Schiff: Treated the Treasury claim about Kilimnik as the Trump-Russia smoking gun. "That's what most people would call collusion," he said. (Al Drago/Pool via AP)Despite the absence of evidence, the Treasury press release's one-sentence claim about Kilimnik has been widely greeted as the Trump-Russia smoking gun. Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who heads the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC that Treasury's assertion about Kilimnik proved that Russian intelligence was "involved in trying to help Trump win in that [2016] election. That's what most people would call collusion."
Speaking to RCI in fluent English from his home in Moscow, Kilimnik, 51, described these U.S. government assertions as "senseless and false accusations."
His comments are backed up by documents, some previously unreported, as well as by Rick Gates, a longtime Manafort associate and key Mueller probe cooperating witness. (Gates pleaded guilty to making a false statement and to failing to register as a foreign agent in connection to his lobbying work in Ukraine.) The evidence raises doubts about new efforts to revive the Trump-Kremlin collusion narrative by casting Kilimnik as a central Russian figure.
"They needed a Russian to investigate 'Russia collusion,' and I happened to be that Russian," Kilimnik said.
Highlights from the interview and RCI's related reporting:
Reviving the Polling Data Conspiracy Theory
- Kilimnik denies passing 2016 polling data to Russian intelligence, or any Russian for that matter. Instead, Kilimnik says he shared publicly available, general information about the 2016 American presidential race to Ukrainian clients of Manafort's in a bid to recover old debts and drum up new business. Gates told RCI that the Mueller team "cherry-picked" his testimony about Kilimnik to spread a misleading, collusion-favorable narrative. The U.S. government has never publicly produced the polling data at issue, nor any evidence that it was shared with Russia.
- Despite his centrality to the Trump-Russia saga, Kilimnik says no U.S. government official has ever tried get in touch with him. "I never had a single contact with [the] FBI or any government official," Kilimnik says.
- Kilimnik shared documents that contradict the Special Counsel's effort to prove that he has Russian intelligence "ties." Photos and video of his Russian passport and a U.S. visa in his name, shared with RCI , undermine the Mueller report's claim that Kilimnik visited the United States on a Russian "diplomatic passport" in 1997. To judge from the images, he travelled on a civilian passport and obtained a regular U.S. visa. The Mueller team has never produced the "diplomatic passport."
- Kilimnik denies traveling to Spain to meet Manafort in 2017. If true, this would undercut the Mueller team's claim that Manafort lied in denying such a meeting. That denial was used to help secure a 2019 court ruling that Manafort breached a cooperation agreement. The Special Counsel never furnished evidence for the alleged Madrid encounter.
- While the Treasury Department and Senate Intelligence Committee claim that Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer, no U.S. security or intelligence agency has adopted this characterization.
- Kilimnik has never been charged with anything related to espionage, Russia, collusion, or the 2016 election. Instead, the Mueller team indicted Kilimnik on witness-tampering charges in a case pertaining to Manafort's lobbying work in Ukraine.
- Meanwhile, t he FBI's $250,000 bounty for Kilimnik is larger than most rewards it offers for the capture of violent fugitives, including those accused of child murder .
Kilminik has provided an inviting target for proponents of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories. He was born in 1970 in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union, and later worked for Paul Manafort as a translator and aide there. This background makes him one of the few people in the broad Trump 2016 campaign orbit to possess a Russian passport.
To this Mueller and others have added a series of ambiguous and disputed allegations to say that the FBI "assesses" him to "have ties to Russian intelligence." This characterization, first made in a 2017 court filing, quickly transmogrified into a presumed fact of the collusion narrative.
Rather than prosecute Manafort for any crime related to Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, the Mueller team instead pursued him on financial and lobbying charges involving his pre-Trump stint as a political consultant in Ukraine. In 2018, it accused Kilimnik of seeking to pressure two "potential witnesses" by sending them text messages about Manafort's Ukraine lobbying work.
As the Russia probe came to a close without a single indictment related to a Trump-Kremlin conspiracy, the Mueller team used Kilimnik to suggest collusion without formally alleging it.
In January 2019, the Mueller team accused Manafort of breaching their cooperation agreement by lying about his interactions with his Russian employee. Topping the list were alleged false statements about sharing election polling data with Kilimnik in 2016.
Andrew Weissmann: Despite this lead Mueller prosecutor's suggestion otherwise, the Mueller report "did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort's sharing polling data and Russia's interference in the election," as the report itself stated. NYU Law"This goes to the larger view of what we think is going on, and what we think is the motive here," lead prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC. "This goes, I think, very much to the heart of what the special counsel's office is investigating."
Weissmann's musings became collusion fodder. Media pundits and influential Democrats, namely Congressional intelligence leaders Schiff and Mark Warner, speculated that Kilimnik shared Trump campaign polling data with Russian intelligence officers as they allegedly worked to turn the election in Trump's favor. "This appears as the closest we've seen yet to real, live, actual collusion," Warner told CNN . "Clearly, Manafort was trying to collude with Russian agents."
But soon after, the Mueller team quietly undercut Weissmann's "larger view" and the conspiratorial innuendo that it had fueled. One month after igniting the frenzy about the polling data, Weissmann submitted a heavily redacted court filing that walked back some of his claims. The following month, the Special Counsel's final report acknowledged that its musings and speculations about Kilimnik could not be corroborated. The Mueller team not only "did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort's sharing polling data and Russia's interference in the election," as the report stated, but also "could not assess what Kilimnik (or others he may have given it to) did with it."
Rick Gates: Ex-Manafort aide says the Mueller team "cherry-picked" his testimony about Kilimnik to spread a misleading, collusion-favorable narrative. AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana"I have no idea who made up the lies about 'detailed' or 'sensitive' polling data, or why they did it," Kilimnik says. "They were mostly quotes of the polls from the media, such as LA Times and others. They would be 'Clinton "" 43, Trump "" 42.' Never anything more detailed. I never got even a page printed out with either polling data or any other info."
This public data was shared, Kilimnik says, with Ukrainian clients of Manafort's as part of both regular political chatter and an effort to encourage future business. "I shared this info with a lot of our clients in Ukraine, who were closely following the race and who were excited about Paul working for [Trump]," Kilimnik says.
If any government official did receive his polling data, Kilimnik adds, they were not Russian but rather from Ukraine or even the United States. "I would share it with our political contacts in Ukraine, basically to keep their interest to Paul and our Ukrainian business alive. Also I shared it with the U.S. and other embassies, basically offering the opinion that the election is not over."
Kilimnik's account is corroborated by Gates, the ex-Manafort associate and Trump campaign official whose testimony was used by the Mueller team "" deceptively, he says "" to suggest a connection between the polling data and possible Trump-Russia collusion. The Special Counsel's office "relied heavily on Mr. Gates for evidence" about the polling data, the New York Times noted in February 2019.
According to Gates, that reliance entailed significant creative license by Mueller's prosecutors, particularly Weissmann. Gates says he told the Special Counsel's Office that the polling data was not sensitive information, but rather publicly available figures taken from media outlets.
"I explained to them, over the course of many interviews, what the polling data was about, and why it was being shared," Gates told RCI. "All that was exchanged was old, topline data from public polls and from some internal polls, but all dated, nothing in real time. So for example, Trump 48, Clinton 46. It was not massive binders full of demographics or deep research. No documents were ever shared or disclosed. And this is part of what Mueller left out of the report. They cherry-picked and built a narrative that really was not true, because they had pre-determined the conclusion."
Happier times: Manafort and colleagues, with Kilimnik far left and the boss seated in white shirt, red tie. AP PhotoAsked why Manafort shared any polling data with clients in Ukraine, Kilimnik and Gates stressed the same reason: money. "The were some outstanding debts, which we were working to get repaid, which never happened," Kilimnik says. "And there was also Paul's reputation. He was very well known to a lot of people in Kiev, and he hoped [he] could generate some new business" by showcasing his work for Trump's campaign.
"This was a way that Paul was using to let people in Ukraine know that he was doing very well in the United States running the election of Donald Trump, and that he was trying to collect the remaining fees that he was owed," for prior work in Ukraine, Gates says. "He was trying to position himself. This is not unlike any other political operative, Republican or Democrat, in politics. They all do it."
The Mueller report itself quietly bolsters Gates' and Kilimnik's converging recollections. "Gates' account about polling data is consistent [redacted]," it states, ""¦ with multiple emails that Kilimnik sent to U.S. associates and press contacts" in the summer of 2016. "Those emails referenced 'internal polling,' described the status of the Trump Campaign and Manafort's role in it, and assessed Trump' s prospects for victory." The corresponding footnote cites eight emails from Kilimnik to these "U.S. associates and press contacts." This indicates that the Mueller team obtained direct evidence of the polling data that was shared; how it was discussed; and with whom it was shared.
Rather than highlight the Kilimnik emails that it obtained, and Gates' account that the polling data was shared for financial reasons, the Mueller report mentioned this information only in passing and ultimately concluded that it "could not reliably determine Manafort's purpose in sharing" the information.
Weissmann did not respond to a request for comment.
The Kilimnik Passport Kilimnik's passport from the time in question "" to judge from photos and a video he shared with RCI "" was issued in the standard red ... Konstantin Kilimnik via RealClearInvestigations ... not in the green of the diplomatic corps. Mueller cited a Kilimnik "diplomatic passport" as evidence of "ties to Russian intelligence." Government of Russia/WikimediaAlthough the Mueller report walked back Weissman's innuendo regarding polling data, its assertion that Kilimnik has "ties to Russian intelligence" remains a foundation of the Russia collusion narrative.
Putting aside the fact that the government has never produced any evidence that Kilimnik communicated with Russian intelligence or the Kremlin, RCI has obtained documents that undercut the government's basis for assuming those unspecified "ties."
In Mueller's own telling, Kilimnik's only direct link to the Russian government was his enrollment in a Soviet military academy from 1987 to 1992, where he trained as a linguist. "It's a language school, similar to what you guys have in Fort Monterey," Kilimnik said, referring to the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, in Monterey, California. "It's a university that trains military translators, mostly for the army, not for the intelligence services. Basically it was a military training, for five years, focusing on English and Swedish. In normal circumstances, I would actually go and serve in the army, but because Soviet Union was falling apart, I was able to get a job as the instructor of Swedish at the university. I never served in the real army. If teaching Swedish counts as spying "" that will be very surprising."
To substantiate Kilimnik's alleged Russian intelligence "ties," the Mueller team wrote that Kilimnik "obtained a visa to travel to the United States with a Russian diplomatic passport in 1997." (Intelligence operatives often travel to foreign countries under diplomatic cover.)
Kilimnik's U.S. visa shows an "R" for "regular." (The typo in his last name was corrected on a later visa.) Konstantin Kilimnik via RealClearInvestigationsBut Kilimnik's passport from that period "" to judge from the images he shared with RCI via a messaging app "" was issued in the standard red color, not in the green color of the diplomatic corps. The document also contains a regular U.S. visa issued on October 28, 1997 "" the same date the Mueller report claims he traveled to the U.S. "with a Russian diplomatic passport." The U.S. visa to Kilimnik is issued under the category of "R" "" which stands for Regular "" and "B1/B2," the designation for a temporary visa for business and tourism.
The Mueller team's claim that he possessed and travelled on a diplomatic passport is "a blatant lie," Kilimnik told RCI. "I never had a diplomatic passport in my life. It's one of many very sloppy things in the Muller report, which don't make sense."
The Mueller report cites Kilimnik's "travel to the United States with a Russian diplomatic passport." Mueller report, Page 133Told of the Mueller report's apparent error concerning Kilimnik's passport, a Justice Department spokesperson declined comment. Former Special Counsel Mueller and former lead prosecutor Weissmann did not respond to emailed queries.
Ironically, at the time when Mueller team claims that he visited the U.S. on behalf of the Russian government, Kilimnik was in fact working for the U.S. government at the U.S. Congress-funded International Republican Institute (IRI) in Moscow. As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported , Kilimnik's 10-year IRI tenure is among several substantial Western government connections that have been ignored in amid efforts to accuse him of ties to the Russian government. "I gave IRI my CV which clearly said which school I graduated from, and gave my detailed background," Kilimnik recalls. "I never concealed anything."
Kilimnik: No Madrid Meeting With ManafortWhen it comes to his travel history, Kilimnik says that the Special Counsel's Office made another significant error: falsely claiming that he and Manafort held a meeting in Spain .
"I have never been to Madrid in my life," Kilimnik says. WikimediaWhen Manafort denied that he and Kilimnik met in Madrid in 2017, the Mueller team accused him of lying and cited this as one of several alleged breaches of their cooperation agreement. The Mueller report claims that the two met in the Spanish capital on Feb. 26, 2017, "where Kilimnik had flown from Moscow."
It also states that Manafort initially denied the Madrid meeting in his first two interviews with the Special Counsel's office, but then relented "after being confronted with documentary evidence that Kilimnik was in Madrid at the same time as him."
But Kilimnik tells RCI that no such meeting occurred, and that he believes that Manafort was coerced into changing his story.
"I have never been to Madrid in my life," Kilimnik says. The "documentary evidence" referenced in the Mueller report was, he speculates, a flight booking that was ultimately cancelled. "I was thinking about going to Madrid, and I discussed it with Paul," he says. "But it made no sense. And ultimately, it was too expensive. So I didn't go."
Had he actually visited Madrid, Kilimnik says, the Mueller team would have "easily found proof "" tickets, boarding passes, border crossings "" all that stuff. It's not rocket science to get it. The European Union is a pretty disciplined place. There would be at least be a record of me crossing the border somewhere in the EU."
Kilimnik told RCI that the last time he saw Manafort was one month before the alleged Madrid trip, around the time of Trump's inauguration in Janaury 2017. "I did not attend any of the inauguration events myself," he recalls. "But I spent some time to meet with Paul, and to catch up. That was our last meeting in-person, in Alexandria [Virginia]."
Asked why Manafort would have admitted to a Madrid meeting that did not in fact take place, Kilimnik said that his former boss faced heavy pressure while locked up by the Mueller team, which included a long stint in solitary confinement. "I don't know why he said that. I have difficulties to imagine Paul's psychological state when he was jailed. A guy who [had] a very high-level life. Jail is a tough place. I still get the shudders to think what he had to go through."
The allegation that Manafort lied to the Mueller team proved consequential. In February 2019, U.S. District Judge Jackson sided with the Special Counsel and voided Manafort's plea deal. No longer bound to give him a reduced sentence for cooperating, Jackson nearly doubled Manafort's prison term on top of his earlier conviction and excoriated him for telling "lies." President Trump pardoned in Manafort in December 2020.
Told that Kilimnik denies ever visiting Madrid, and asked whether the Special Counsel's office collected concrete evidence to the contrary, both former Special Counsel Mueller and lead prosecutor Weissmann did not respond. A Justice Department spokesperson declined comment.
FBI Alert Contradicts Senate-Treasury Spy ClaimOver one year after Mueller closed up shop, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) unilaterally upgraded Kilimnik's alleged Russian intelligence status. The panel's August 2020 report declared that Kilimnik, far from merely having "ties" to the GRU as Mueller had claimed, is in fact a full-fledged "Russian intelligence officer."
The Senate made the leap despite offering no new public evidence to support its explosive "assessment", and even acknowledging that its "power to investigate" "" as well as "its staffing, resources, and technical capabilities" -- ultimately "falls short of the FBI's."
Richard Burr and Mark Warner, Republican chair and Democratic co-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The FBI and Justice Department do not endorse their panel's judgment that Kilimnik is a "Russian intelligence officer." AP Photo/J. Scott ApplewhiteThe Senate also labelled Kilimnik a Russian spy despite simultaneously presenting new evidence that he was, in the Committee's own words, a "valuable resource" for officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, with whom he was "in regular contact."
In September 2020, RCI asked the FBI and Justice Department whether it shares the SSCI's judgment that Kilimnik is a "Russian intelligence officer." A DOJ spokesperson replied that "the Mueller report speaks for itself," and advised that the public "defer" to how Kilimnik was characterized in the Mueller report and the Special Counsel Office's indictments. This strongly suggested, RCI reported, that the FBI has not adopted the SSCI's view that Kilimnik is a Russian spy.
The FBI's February "alert" offering $250,000 for information leading to Kilimnik's arrest bolsters this reporting. It once again states that Kilimnik is "assessed by the FBI to have ties to Russian intelligence" "" shunning the SSCI's spy language and reverting to Mueller's original, ambiguous characterization.
The wording of the FBI alert underscores that while the Senate Intelligence Committee and Treasury Department have declared that Kilimnik is a Russian spy, the nation's top law enforcement agency has never adopted that assessment. When Manafort's legal team asked the Special Counsel's Office for any communication between Manafort and "Russian intelligence officials," they were told that "there are no materials responsive to [those] requests." In unsealed notes from early 2017, Peter Strzok "" the top FBI counterintelligence agent who opened the Trump-Russia investigation "" wrote : "We are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials."
Asked whether the FBI has altered its characterization of Kilimnik in light of Treasury's claim that he is a "known Russian Intelligence Services agent", an FBI spokesperson declined comment.
The FBI's alert was also remarkable for the size of the Kilimnik bounty, which is more than double the amount of most members of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List. While the bureau is offering $100,000 each for information regarding six alleged murderers, and $200,000 for another, the FBI is offering $250,000 for help nabbing Kilimnik on a lone witness tampering charge in Manafort's Ukraine lobbying case.
The Mueller team accused Kilimnik of sending text messages to two individuals with whom Manafort had worked during his Ukraine lobbying days. Kilimnik's aim, the Special Counsel's Office alleged, was to pressure the pair to attest that their prior work was focused on lobbying officials in Europe, not in the United States. These individuals "" identified in court documents as "Person D1" and "Person D2" "" were not active witnesses for the Mueller probe, but instead, according to the Special Counsel's Office, "potential witnesses."
The 13 Kilimnik messages to these "potential witnesses" cited by Mueller include the following:
Kilimnik says that he was not trying to tamper with anyone. "I do not understand how two messages to our old partners who helped us get out the message about Ukraine's integration aspirations in EU, and asking them to get in touch with Paul, can be interpreted as 'intimidation' or 'obstruction of justice,'" he says.
Whether or not Kilimnik sought to tamper with "potential witnesses" in Manafort's Ukraine lobbying case, the alleged 2018 infraction has nothing to do with 2016 Trump-Russia collusion.
The FBI alert from February raises questions about the bombshell Treasury Department claims released two months later. If the U.S. government stands by Treasury's claims about Kilimnik, why is he wanted only on a minor, non-Russia related witness-tampering charge, and not for taking part in alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election? If Kilimnik indeed passed on "sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy" to Russian intelligence while working as a spy, why has he not been indicted alongside the Russian social media company charged by Mueller in February 2018, or the Russian intelligence officers charged by Mueller in July 2018?
To Kilimnik, the answer is found on that same Russian passport that Mueller mischaracterized. "It is clear to me that the indictment of 2018 was pulled out of the thin air, simply to have a Russian face in the mix," he says. "I understand that they needed a Russian to investigate 'Russia collusion,' and I happened to be that Russian," he says.
"The funny thing is that I'm not hiding. And I would have explained the same thing to the FBI or anyone who never reached out to me. They don't because they don't want the truth."
From Russian Spy to "Influence Agent"In Kilimnik's eyes, his utility as a Russian national for the Trump-Russia collusion narrative also explains his prominent inclusion in the recent U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment , released in March one month after the FBI alert for his arrest.
In yet another new iteration of how Kilimnik is described by the U.S. government, the ICA does not call him a Russian intelligence officer, but instead a "Russian influence agent."
The ICA does not define the term "Russian influence agent," or explain how it reached that new assessment about Kilimnik. Nor does it put forth any evidence for the alleged Russian influence activities ascribed to him .
The report alleges that Kilimnik was part of a "network of Ukraine-linked individuals "¦ connected to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB)" who "took steps throughout the [2020] election cycle to damage U.S. ties to Ukraine, denigrate President Biden and his candidacy, and benefit former President Trump's prospects for reelection."
Andriy Derkach: "I have never met him in my life," Kilimnik says of this Ukrainian lawmaker with reputed Kremlin ties. Petro Zhuravel/WikimediaAs part of this alleged meddling network, the ICA asserts that Kilimnik tried to influence U.S. officials; helped produce a documentary that aired on U.S. television in January 2020; and worked with Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker alleged to have Kremlin ties. "Derkach, Kilimnik, and their associates sought to use prominent U.S. persons and media conduits to launder their narratives to U.S. officials and audiences," the ICA states.
Kilimnik says the U.S. intelligence officials who wrote those words are using their anonymity and power to launder their false narratives about him.
"I have no idea what they're talking about," he says. "I would really love to see at least one confirmation of the things they allege. Pulling me into this report with zero evidence really shows that [U.S. intelligence] people high up do not give a damn about the truth, facts, or anything."
As for Derkach, "I have never met him in my life," Kilimnik says. "I don't know why, or on what basis, they're making claims that he has any relationship to me."
"I had zero meetings with anybody related to the Trump campaign. In fact, I have tried to do my best "" understanding how I've gotten into this mess "" to stay as far as possible from any U.S. politics." If he had held such meetings, Kilimnik adds, "this should be easy to prove."
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to requests for comment.
No Effort to Contact Russiagate's Top RussianEven though Kilimnik's name fills dozens of pages of the Mueller and Senate Intelligence reports after years of federal scrutiny and he is the target of a $250,000 FBI reward, this seemingly critical Russiagate figure has never been contacted by a single U.S. government official, to judge from the public record as well as Kilimnik's account.
The lack of contact is similar to the way FBI, Mueller, and Senate investigators treated other supposedly central Russiagate figures. When Joseph Mifsud, whose conversations with George Papadopoulos triggered the FBI's Trump-Russia probe, visited the U.S. in early 2017, the FBI subjected him to a light round of questioning and then let him leave the country. The Mueller team later claimed in its final report that Mifsud had lied to FBI agents, yet inexplicably did not indict him. Despite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's central role in publishing the stolen Democratic Party emails supposedly hacked and supplied by Russia, the Mueller team never contacted him and the Senate Intelligence Committee shunned an offer to interview him .
Kilimnik believes that this avoidance is deliberate. "The FBI and others could have had the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv or Moscow, or have any of my numerous contacts in the U.S., reach out and start a conversation, if they wanted info," he says. "But they do not really need it. All they is need is a scarecrow. And as one of the few people within reach of the Trump campaign who has a Russian passport, they picked me."
"They never reached out to me," he adds. "I never had a single contact with FBI or any government official, basically since charges were brought [on] Paul. Nobody ever tried to talk to me because they know the truth. They understood damn well that I will tell them what I'm telling you."
Kilimnik says that he has had only minimal contact with Manafort since the former Trump campaign chairman was released to home confinement in March 2020 and subsequently pardoned by Trump in late December. "We had one short contact after he got out of jail, basically catching up about family and kids and everything," Kilimnik recalls. "I want to give him time to just basically get his life back to normal. We have not spoken on the telephone."
After years in Ukraine working with Manafort, Kilimnik now lives full-time in Moscow with his wife and two children. "I have been pretty open all my life, and have not been hiding from anyone," Kilimnik says. "I would have been happy to answer any questions from the FBI, or whoever. But I refuse to be a toy in bizarre political games and have my life ruined more than it has been because of the senseless and false accusations."
Despite being labeled a Russian spy who meddled in the 2016 election, Kilimnik has no plans to return to the U.S. and try to clear his name. "I am not going to the U.S. on my own dime, with no visa in COVID times only to be crucified by the media, having zero chance of justice," he says. "This is a sad continuation of a deeply wrong story. I thought it would be over with Trump gone and the need to create lies about his 'ties to Russia.' But obviously, I was wrong."
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- roc993 19 May, 2021 Did the Democrats and the media ever apologize for spending 2 years claiming the election was stolen by Trump? The drumbeat was continuous - ratcheting up day by day - "Walls closing in" - right up to the point Mueller threw cold water on the entire thing. Then they slinked away without another word. And no censorship of those entities and individuals by FaceBook and Twitter? Fascinating. Reply 40 11 2 reply
- N notenough 19 May, 2021 What are the odds that the FBI/Treasury Dept, CIA, etc are lying to the public about this whole mess THEY created....100%. These are all political organizations, tasked with protecting the status quo, the status quo being the protection of Empire. Reply 30 7 1 reply
- A AJMG 19 May, 2021 "In his speech before a joint session of Congress last week, President Biden complained about "Russia's interference in our elections," even though his intelligence czar had released a report the previous month formally dismissing the idea Moscow had interfered in the 2020 election or the 2016 election." Reply 23 7 1 reply
- D daniel155 19 May, 2021 No one, even those on the other side, believes there was Russian collusion though they will never admit it. Hillary still says the Russia stole the election from her. I guess she uses that to cope with the fact that she blew a very winnable election. Reply 28 7
- A AJMG 19 May, 2021 Trump opposed Russia's Nord Stream 2 pipeline, & today we learn that Biden has accepted it. If Putin favored Trump, it was a bad miscalculation since Trump was way more tough on Russia than any Democrat. Reply 36 6 1 reply
- DH Derrick Hand 19 May, 2021 Hate to tell you guys but the Russia collusion discussion is over, no matter who is right. The Media has succeeded in mudding the water and destroying any trust in finding the truth with respect to anything political, including any election and that includes the coming one in 2022. This is like an argument at a table for four in a raucous high school cafeteria. You should be more concerned where this total loss of trust is going to lead us and that is not a good place. Reply 16 6 3 reply
- W Wisewerds 19 May, 2021 A wholly partisan, politically biased prosecutor lied and cherry-picked information to support a pre-determined conclusion in an effort to savage an opponent and jail his supporters? I would put on my shocked face, but its currently at the cleaners. Instead, I will just suggest that this is now standard operating procedure for our left-fascist oppressors. Reply 21 4 1 reply
- C Crutch 19 May, 2021 I can't wait for 2022 House win by Republicans. The first thing they should do is haul Adam Schiff in under oath to discuss his every utterance, then expel him from the House. Reply 40 9 5 reply
- A archon27 19 May, 2021 It not sedition if the democrats try to oust a legally elected president on a falsified premise... because THEIR "evidence" was believable... This is literally the mantra of the left. Reply 27 6 3 reply
- Mark H 19 May, 2021 If the wider media do not pick this up then the matter of Trump campaign's collusion with Russia can never be cleared up, and will continue to serve the intention of the establishment. VAPOR 19 May, 2021 The media portrayed both Obama and Biden as uninvolved. But now we know they both actively followed the investigation. According to former acting attorney general Sally Yates, she was surprised that Obama knew about the investigation and knew more than she did at the time. Obama called upon former FBI director James Comey to stay after a meeting to discuss the investigation. Comey had mentioned using the Logan Act to charge Flynn, even though the unconstitutional law has never been used successfully in a prosecution since the country was founded. Biden has repeatedly denied knowledge of the investigation. Just a day before the latest disclosure, George Stephanopoulos asked Biden in an interview what he knew of the Flynn investigation. Biden was adamant that he knew nothing about "those moves" and he called it a diversion. But that is not true if he took the relatively uncommon action for a vice president of demanding the unmasking of Flynn information.
Justis 20 May, 2021 Thank you for your continued work. This is all hidden from Americans in this age of media coverage. But more importantly it is devastating information about the dishonesty of our government. What have we come to? What recourse is available?futbolfan 19 May, 2021 I respect all the dogged investigators who root out the truth of the crimes and corruption of our "justice department", and FBI. I hope they keep up the good work. Personally I have no more faith in anything which was soaked in the hate and insanity of the Obama thug regime...
- VAPOR 19 May, 2021 Carter Page Sues FBI, Comey, McCabe for Millions Nov 28, 2020" Former Trump campaign aide Carter Page filed a $75 million lawsuit against the FBI and several former high-ranking bureau officials ... Reply 6 1 1 reply
- V VAPOR 19 May, 2021 Just a reminder that Obama and his minions committed the greatest political crime in US history when they weaponized government agencies to influence and discredit a presidential election and frame Trump. Reply 7 3 1 reply
- V VAPOR 19 May, 2021 Obama needs to answer questions about his involvement with the Fake Russian Dossier and the weaponization of government agencies to get Trump. He basically planted evidence and then said prosecute Trump by the book.
- Jerubbesheth xx 19 May, 2021 Give it up already. The Russia Trump Collusion was already disapproved by Mueller. Americans are tired of the disinformation and propaganda. Bolshevik Schiff is a pathological liar. If anyone colluded with Russia it was certainly Liberal Commie Democrat Clinton. The reason Bolshevik Schiff doesn't investigate Clinton? Schiff and Clinton are part of the swamp. Clinton bought and paid for colluded with an ex-British Spy on a false dossier on Trump. Clinton was already in Putin's pocket. Clinton approved the sale of Uranium one to the Russians, and then Clinton receives $145 Million from Russian Oligarchs for her Corrupt Clinton Foundation. Mueller was FBI director at the time. So now who is colluding with the Russians. I guess Clinton's colluding with the Russians is the good kind for the liberal commie Democrats, while the Liberal commie Democrats deflect the bad colluding onto to Trump. Colluding is colluding anyway you cut it. Hillary's colluding wasn't disapproved. Reply 10 3 3 reply
- C chuckstephens06 19 May, 2021 While the Special prosecutor office was capable of any transgression or corruption, one needs to realize that it wouldn't have been possible without the assistance of corrupt lefty operative Judge, Amy Berman Jackson... Jackson's non legal, political approach to decision making, has been the example that all corrupt lefty judges follow... Plus her questionable relationship with Weissman outside of the Courtroom... Reply 6 2
- K kochcomics 20 May, 2021 Lets see what we have here: 1)Kilimnik says he has no ties to the Russian government. OK. Do you really believe that no one in the Putin's government has directly or indirectly debriefed him. Really? Do you think he would have a choice in the matter? Do you know anything about Putin at all? Does he believe in democracy,. You clearly know little about Trump. We've had Trump here for 40 years - from the NY Post page six to Howard Stern. Its a joke. Hey, he was proposing running with Oprah as his VP in 2002. Then he tricked into the birther stuff. Lets check out the apologies from the Donald and the push back from Republicans (apart from McCain) 2) There were enough sympathetic Russians around (Putin included) to raise concerns. As the Donald himself made clear, he would have no problem with outside foreign help. The investigation took place. It was damning, but not pretty clear that no . The collusion was possible but speculative, but as Jared himself said, the campaign was too chaotic for any collusion to really get off the ground (though you are still stuck with Manafort as a conflicted party). But in Donald world, everything is a bout big pronouncements... See more Reply 2 2
- F futbolfan 19 May, 2021 For years, we on the right knew who had done what, and who should be arrested, Comey, Rosenstein, Strzok, Mueller, etc. But I am not a lawyer, and I am not sure what crimes, exactly, these evil and sick creeps would be charged with, if they ever were arrested. For me, the key question now is, if they WERE charged with whatever the appropriate offence would be, what is the statute of limitations on those types of crimes? There is NO statue on treason, as far as I know. But what about conspiracy? Obstruction of justice? Betrayal of oath of office? Sedition? The reason these questions are still alive is, obviously there are people still patiently digging into the twisting trails of the conspirators, and eventually they may reel in some live prospects for prosecution. Maybe even including "the big guy with black skin" Obama himself. Nothing would make me happier than to see that African nightmare in handcuffs. Reply 4 4 2 reply
- DC dana crow 20 May, 2021 Can't blame them for running with lies, innuendo and conspiracy theories when all Trump and Republicans could ever muster in response was nuh-uh or let-mueller-finish-his-work. "Ties to [insert boogeyman]" is always a tell. It literally means NOT the boogeyman. And since the "ties" are conveniently redacted, he probably ordered borscht from someone whose second cousin gave a talk at a charity event hosted by a retired russian intel gofer. The election interference/russia collusion business was always a cynical ploy to isolate Trump from his friends and bog down his administration. And it was wildly successful.
will.ganness 20 May, 2021 Who is calling the January 6th Protests the biggest threat the the country since the Civil war? The Democratic Party, the MSM, The FBI.... Who produced and directed Russiagate? The same three!! If progressives think they should get on board with Insurrectiongate, they should have more sense! VAPOR 19 May, 2021 The Fake Russian Dossier do it by the book Crossfire Hurricane insurance policy to overturn a presidential election and frame Trump. Where is Professor Misfud and why won't Steele talk to Durham? Call in Mary Jacoby and ask her what she discussed with Obama at the white house.
- spinbag48 1 day ago Adam Schiff is a fool who told us he had the goods on Trump, but it turns out he is a liar. I do have a question... The FBI spent 2 years and $35 million dollars investigating Trump only to find out they didn't have a case. But when the pipeline got hacked Biden said the FBI told him that the Kremlin wasn't involved within a day of two. How is it they got that good so quick? Same with the election within a couple of days they knew that the election was fair and square. Even though I saw many people of TV say they saw corruption right in front of them. But the shooting of Andrew Brown took a month when they had numerous videos that they couldn't release until the investigation was complete. I have lost all faith in the FBI, and the press. They don't even pretend they are fair or truthful. Reply 1 1
- CA Clear 4 All 19 May, 2021 The USIC and media has destroyed their own name. Nothing that the Russia collusion purveyors say now has value on any topic. Russia didn't do that.
Justis 20 May, 2021 Why did Horowitz not discover this in his investigation? Was that investigation another coverup, finding just enough to look authentic? Is he too, untrustworthy?
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May 20, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
vk , May 19 2021 22:31 utc | 35
Very aggressive stuff from the EU:
A draft report published online by the assembly's Committee on Foreign Affairs caused consternation in Russian media on Monday, after statements came to light that argued the bloc "should establish with the US a transatlantic alliance to defend democracy globally" and "deter Russia" from supposed aggression in Eastern Europe.As part of its "vision" for future ties with Moscow, the paper concludes that the EU should put forward a number of incentives designed to persuade Russians that a turn to the West would be beneficial, including visa liberalization and "free trade investment."
[...]
At the same time, the committee puts forward a number of extreme steps that it says the bloc should take. It insists that Brussels "must be prepared not to recognize the parliament of Russia and to ask for Russia's suspension from international organizations with parliamentary assemblies if the 2021 parliamentary elections in Russia are recognized as fraudulent."
The success or failure of this operation will depend entirely on the Russian people. Will it fall for the Western European honey trap once again?
After Putin is gone, bets are off. Also, the EU continues to suffer from refugee waves from Syria and Libya, and its economy continues to deteriorate (recession confirmed for Q1 2021). The whole system is so exhausted that they don't talk about even of the absorption of Moldova anymore (the Moldovan president had to bring that up to the Kremlin; good they remembered them).
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US waives sanctions against Nord Stream company and CEO as Blinken & Lavrov meet in Iceland
This looks like Biden had some surge of sanity, but it's not: I read an article on Izvestia some days ago and it seems Russia won the war for the Arctic and has expelled the USA from that sea. That, combined with the fact that Russia has been ramping up investment on the sector, results in the fact that, soon enough, Russia will also have the infrastructure to deliver cheaper LNG by ship to Europe, too.
That means the USA has given up on the NordStream II in order to hurt the Russian LNG investments. Yes, people, that's the insanity of the situation: the USG is completely lost. It still has its ace in the hole, though: the Green Party is set to win the next German general elections, and they're rabid Atlanticists. Like, this would cost Germany dearly and they wouldn't last two years in government, but at least Russian gas to Europe through a non-Ukrainian route would be stopped.
Speaking of the Ukraine, this whole situation makes us reflect: it is patent at this point in time that the EU is a subsidiary of NATO - it expands eastwards after those countries become NATO members. They're the "socioeconomic" version of NATO. This has created a huge problem for the EU, though, because the Ukraine is a massive financial black hole to the American economy (through the IMF) and the USA is pressuring the EU to make it a member quick, so that this black hole goes to European (i.e. German) hands. The thing is Germany obviously doesn't want that, because it needs the Euro to keep at where it is or stronger (you can only enter the EU by entering the EZ nowadays). The Ukraine is salivating to become an EZ member - that's the whole point of the Maidan coup in the first place - so Ukraine entering the EU without entering the EZ is out of the table. The EU must've told the USA that no, the Ukraine must first become a NATO member, then they'll make it an EZ-EU member. The Ukraine is the proverbial hot potato.
All of that coupled with the hard economic fact that, without the Russian gas transit exclusivity, you can't leverage Ukraine's debt, because, after Maidan, all of the public goods and infrastructure were privatized to American capitalists. That means we have the absurd situation where Germany has to give up cheaper gas for itself (which would be essential for its economic recovery) in order to make the Ukraine happy so that it enters the EU, so that it becomes a financial black hole... to the German economy! Germany has to pay the Ukraine for the privilege of having to pay it even more, for eternity.
The price of nation-building has become more and more expensive to the capitalist world. Turns out those Third World shitholes have learned something after all those decades.
--//--
Well, well, well... how the tables have turned:
Taiwan is also suffering from a significant brain drain to the Mainland. They're trying to solve the problem by demonizing those people by calling them "traitors".
Interesting times.
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Colonial Pipeline CEO confirms paying $4.4 million ransom to hackers, says he did it for America
This is USSR-of-the-1980s level of propaganda.
Either way, give that man a statue in D.C.!
P.S.: this is the quotation of what the CEO really said, so you don't accusing me of just reading the headline:
"[it was very hard, difficult to me etc. etc.] But it was the right thing to do for the country," Blount, who leads the company since 2017, added.--//--
No shit, Sherlock:
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More Hacks, More Baseless Accusations Against Russia
In January police in various countries took down the Emotet bot-network that was at that time the basic platform for some 25% of all cybercrimes.
Based on hearsay Wikipedia and other had falsely attributed Emotet to Russian actors. The real people behind it were actually Ukrainians :
The operating center of Emotet was found in the Ukraine. Today the Ukrainian national police took control of it during a raid (video). The police found dozens of computers, some hundred hard drives, about 50 kilogram of gold bars (current price ~$60,000/kg) and large amounts of money in multiple currencies.
biggerEmotet had nothing to do with Russia.
Now the U.S. is accusing Russia of somehow having part in another cybercrime :
President Joe Biden said Monday that a Russia-based group was behind the ransomware attack that forced the shutdown of the largest oil pipeline in the eastern United States.The FBI identified the group behind the hack of Colonial Pipeline as DarkSide, a shadowy operation that surfaced last year and attempts to lock up corporate computer systems and force companies to pay to unfreeze them.
"So far there is no evidence ... from our intelligence people that Russia is involved, although there is evidence that actors, ransomware is in Russia," Biden told reporters.
"They have some responsibility to deal with this," he said.
Three days after being forced to halt operations, Colonial said Monday it was moving toward a partial reopening of its 5,500 miles (8,850 kilometers) of pipeline" the largest fuel network between Texas and New York.
Biden however is badly informed. There is no evidence that DarkSide has anything to do with Russia. It is, like Emotet, a commercial 'ransomware-as-a-service' criminal entity that wants to make money and does not care about geopolitics.
Yes, a version of the DarkNet software does exclude itself from running on system with specific language settings :
The DarkSide malware is even built to conduct language checks on targets and to shut down if it detects Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Armenian, Georgian, Kazakh, Turkmen, Romanian, and other languages ...That is a quite long list of east European languages and Russian is only one of it. Why the authors of DarkNet do not want their software to run on machines with those language settings is unknown. But why would a Russian actor protect machines with Ukrainian or Romanian language settings? Both countries are hostile towards Russia. To claim that this somehow points to Russian actors is therefore baseless.
Russia strongly rejected Biden's accusation:
The Kremlin has once again pointed out the importance of cooperation between Moscow and Washington in tackling cyberthreats amid a cyber-attack on Colonial Pipeline, a US company. "Russia has nothing to do with these hacker attacks, nor with the previous hacker attacks," Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Preskov assured reporters on Tuesday."We categorically reject any accusation against us, and we can only regret that the US is refusing to cooperate with us in any way to counter cyber-threats. We believe that such cooperation - both international and bilateral - could indeed contribute to the common struggle against this scourge [known as] cyber-crime," Peskov said.
The U.S. seems notoriously bad at attributing computer hacks. It claims that the recent SolarWinds attack which intruded several government branches was also done by Russia. But that attack required deep insider knowledge and access to SolarWinds' computers and processes :
The recently discovered deep intrusion into U.S. companies and government networks used a manipulated version of the SolarWinds Orion network management software. The Washington borg immediately attributed the hack to Russia. Then President Trump attributed it to China. But none of those claims were backed up by facts or known evidence.
The hack was extremely complex, well managed and resourced, and likely required insider knowledge. To this IT professional it 'felt' neither Russian nor Chinese. It is far more likely, as Whitney Webb finds, that Israel was behind it .
Indeed - the programmers of an Israeli company, recently bought up by SolarWinds, had all the necessary access for such a hack. However the U.S. sanctioned Russia over the SolarWinds hack without providing any evidence of its involvement.
If the U.S. continues to blame Russia without any evidence for each and every hack there may come a time when Russia stops caring and really starts to hack into or destroy important U.S. systems. The U.S. should fear that day.
Posted by b on May 11, 2021 at 17:31 UTC | Permalink
David G Horsman , May 11 2021 17:48 utc | 1
Thanks b. I don't think Russia is going to escalate destructive attacks any time soon. There's no upside.psychohistorian , May 11 2021 17:56 utc | 2
They might even be reluctant to reveal their capabilities in the Ukraine.
For the moment, mockery is the best remedy while they up their game.@ b who ended withanon48 , May 11 2021 18:20 utc | 3
"
If the U.S. continues to blame Russia without any evidence for each and every hack there may come a time when Russia stops caring and really starts to hack into or destroy important U.S. systems.
"How can you write such assertions that vary from the approach that both Russia and China are taking?....strong defense but no offense.
Now if empire tried to hack into a Russian or Chinese system/network then appropriate takedowns of malicious systems/networks would seem logical....and I expect they know how...but will not do it on the basis of another avenue of empire lies and deceit.
You should have titled the post "Killing Two Birds With One Stone".Ike , May 11 2021 18:27 utc | 4
This pipeline is huge, running from Texas through the Southeast and all the way up to New England. It's condition is beyond awful with multiple leaks along the route some of which lose more than a million gallons per month and much more than can be determined since some of the gasoline / jet fuel went into the aquifers. These faults have been well known for decades and although some of the areas are heavily populated no remediation was done. The local outcry recently caught the attention of the press when kids reported a gasoline smell along the pipeline route to the police. The locals demanded the pipeline be closed for repairs and sought answers from state officials and Federal authorities as to why this situation was allowed. To blame the Russians for the closure of the pipeline which results in a surge in prices and limited availability of gas for the summer is an absolute stroke of genius.
https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/local/ncdeq-colonial-pipeline-spill-huntersville/275-70e16fb6-c945-4634-b933-3975d0573f2eGreat article. Russia must be getting so pissed off with the idiots in Washington.The uninformed and easily manipulated Western people surely get the governments they deserve.DG , May 11 2021 18:43 utc | 5
Paul Craig Roberts highlights this with another bit of truth telling from Tucker Carlson
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/05/11/the-proof-is-in-tony-fauci-is-responsible-for-the-creation-of-the-covid-19-virus/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_proof_is_in_tony_fauci_is_responsible_for_the_creation_of_the_covid_19_virus&utm_term=2021-05-11@allJosh , May 11 2021 18:44 utc | 6I need to ask this: What do you think about the vaccination of children?
...
It is odd that certain elements of the us intelligence community, along with negative factions within the us political establishment, continue to absolutely refuse to enter into verifiable and mutually binding international agreements on cyber security with exactly the nation states that they accuse (without evidence) of malicious activity in the same sphere, while at the same time operating in this field in an openly declared hostile manner under the secrecy deemed necessary for 'national security'.
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May 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Blackhat , May 19 2021 18:51 utc | 6
The Colonial Pipeline Co.,ransomware attack was a false flag. They wanted to blame Russian hackers so they could derail Nordstream IIIt is common knowledge that the only real hackers that are able of such sabotage is CIA and Israeli. It's the same attack types they do to Iranian infrastructure on a regular basis.
The Russians are not that stupid to do something they know will be blamed on them and is of no political use to them. And could derail Nordstream2.
As for the money-nobody really knows where it really went. CEO is ultra corrupt. They never ever invested in their infrastructure so when it went down they came up with a profitable excuse. Just look at their financials/balance sheet over the years. No real investment in updating and maintaining infrastructure. Great false flag. Corruption and profiteering.
MarkU , May 19 2021 19:04 utc | 7
@ Blackhat | May 19 2021 18:51 utc | 6james , May 19 2021 19:08 utc | 9"As for the money-nobody really knows where it really went." If you are right about the perpetrators, my guess would be that it went into the black-ops fund, two birds one stone.
abee , May 19 2021 19:21 utc | 10@ 6 blackhat..
I have become so used to false flags, I am going to be shocked when a real intrusion happens!
vinnieoh , May 19 2021 20:05 utc | 15@ blackhat 6
an in depth article researching solarwinds hack - looks like it was Israel, not a great leap to see that colonial was a false flag https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/01/investigative-reports/another-mega-group-spy-scandal-samanage-sabotage-and-the-solarwinds-hack/
vk , May 19 2021 22:31 utc | 35Blackhat | May 19 2021 18:51 utc | 6
I'm not familiar with your handle - hello. IMO, it would be counterproductive for Russia to initiate such a hack. What really affects and debilitates US oil and gas interests is low prices, both at the pump and on the stock exchange. The hack helped jack up prices (which were already being jacked-up despite demand still lagging behind supply) which only HELPS those energy interests. It has long been known, the math isn't complicated, what level crude must trade at for US domestic oil & gas operations to be profitable. Remember that just as the pandemic was emerging Russia and Saudi Arabia once again sent the global crude market into the depths of despair.
I do agree the hack can be interpreted in light of the desperation of US energy interests to try to kill NS2. I have not yet read the recent articles discussing Biden's recent moves in that regard. If these moves are a recognition that US LNG to Europe (and elsewhere) are diametrically opposed to climate responsibility, I'd welcome those moves. As is usually the case though, environmental responsibility is probably the least likely reason.
Paul , May 19 2021 23:42 utc | 42Colonial Pipeline CEO confirms paying $4.4 million ransom to hackers, says he did it for America
This is USSR-of-the-1980s level of propaganda. Either way, give that man a statue in D.C.!
P.S.: this is the quotation of what the CEO really said, so you don't accusing me of just reading the headline:
"[it was very hard, difficult to me etc. etc.] But it was the right thing to do for the country," Blount, who leads the company since 2017, added.--//--
No shit, Sherlock:
Posted By Oldhippy @28
Thanks for your comment.
Regarding the ownership of Colonial Pipeline: 'IFM Investors, which is owned by 27 Australian union- and employer-backed industry superannuation funds, owns a 16 per cent stake in Colonial Pipeline, which the infrastructure manager bought in 2007 for $US651 million.'
also
'The privately held Colonial Pipeline is valued at about $US8 billion, based upon the most recent sale of a 10 per cent stake to a unit of Royal Dutch Shell in 2019.'
see Australian Financial Review 6 days ago.
Koch may well own another multi million $ stake.
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May 20, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClearPolitics.com,
The Biden administration is vigorously pursuing key figures from the phony Trump/Russia collusion scandal that roiled the nation for four years. But instead of trying to punish the liars who perpetrated that fraud, it is targeting the truth-tellers who challenged and exposed the conspiracy to negate the 2016 election.
Working from the same playbook used to smear dozens of Trump associates, the administration and its allies are planting stories based on blind quotes in friendly media outlets to seek revenge.
On April 16, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported that the Justice Department is investigating Kash Patel – who had worked with Rep. Devin Nunes and later the Trump administration to reveal the Russiagate hoax – for the "possible improper disclosure of classified information." Ignatius said he received the tip from "two knowledgeable sources" who "wouldn't provide additional details."
Violating the bedrock principles of American justice and journalism, this article is an exercise in thuggery as the government uses a powerful media outlet to intimidate and besmirch a citizen without evidence. With nothing to respond to, how can Patel defend himself? If Patel is lucky, the federal government has only placed a sharp sword over his head that may not fall. If not, he might be dragged into a lengthy court battle that could drain his finances and also cost him his freedom.
We don't know if Patel broke the law, but note that the administration has shown no interest in pursuing former FBI leaders such as James Comey and Andrew McCabe , who improperly disclosed information regarding Russiagate.
Trump's former lawyer Rudolph Giuliani is also in the "cross hairs of a federal criminal investigation," according to an April 29 article in New York Times that relied on "people with knowledge of the matter."
At issue, those anonymous sources say, is whether Giuliani was serving two masters when he counseled Trump to remove Marie L. Yovanovitch as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in 2019. "Did Mr. Giuliani go after Ms. Yovanovitch solely on behalf of Mr. Trump, who was his client at the time?" the Times reports. "Or was he also doing so on behalf of the Ukrainian officials, who wanted her removed for their own reasons?"
I'll leave it to the lawyers to determine the wisdom of bringing a case based on the parsing of tangled motives. What is clear is that the FBI is taking a thumb-screws page from the playbook of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who deployed the little-used Foreign Agents Registration Act to pursue the white whale of collusion. As Lee Smith reported for RealClearInvestigations , just three people had pleaded guilty to FARA violations in the half-century before Mueller deployed it to pressure and punish Trump allies.
And note, the FBI's zeal to crack down on unregistered foreign agents does not extend to the president's son Hunter Biden, who, Paul Sperry reported for RCI, "failed to register as a foreign agent while promoting the interests of foreign business partners in Washington, including brokering meetings with his father and other government officials." It appears that we have two tiers of justice: one for Biden administration enemies, another for its family and friends.
The targeting of Giuliani looks especially suspect and politically motivated after three main news outlets that have driven much of the false Russiagate coverage – the New York Times, Washington Post and NBC News – were forced to correct a recent story , once again based on anonymous sources, claiming the FBI had warned Giuliani in 2019 "that he was a target of a Russian disinformation campaign during his efforts to dig up unflattering information about then-candidate Joe Biden in 2019." Giuliani was never given such a briefing.
Considering the numerous instances in which the press published bogus information from "informed sources" during Russiagate, one has to ask why they continue to serve as vehicles for falsehoods. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me a dozen times and you're not fooling me – we're acting in concert. As RCI editor Tom Kuntz has argued, journalistic integrity demands, at the very least, that these organizations tell their audience who exactly had misled them. Confidentiality agreements should not protect liars.
A third example of the Biden administration's effort to punish Russiagate figures is its renewed effort to put former Manafort associate Konstantin V. Kilimnik behind bars. In an extensive new article for RCI, Aaron Maté reports that the Treasury Department provided no evidence to support its recent claim that Kilimnik is a "known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf." It also refuses to explain how it was able to discover the truth of Kilimnik's identity, which the two most extensive Russiagate investigations – the 448-page Muller report and the 966-page Senate Intelligence report – failed to uncover.
This absence of evidence has not stopped the peddlers of the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory from claiming vindication. Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff casts Treasury's unsubstantiated claim as smoking-gun evidence of collusion. The New York Times reports that the claim demonstrates that "there had been numerous interactions between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence during the year before the [2016] election."
Who needs proof when the government says it's so?
The FBI is also putting the screws to Kilimnik, offering $250,000 for information leading to his arrest on witness-tampering charges involving text messages he sent in 2018 to two people who have only been identified as "potential witnesses" involving Manafort's lobbying work for Ukraine, not Russiagate.
In an exclusive interview, Kilimnik told Maté, "I don't understand how two messages to our old partners who helped us get out the message about Ukraine's integration aspirations in [the] EU, and asking them to get in touch with Paul, can be interpreted as 'intimidation' or 'obstruction of justice.'"
Maté also reports that the $250,000 bounty on Kilimnik is more than double the amount the FBI is offering for information leading to the arrest of murder suspects.
The Biden administration's campaigns against Patel, Giuliani and Kilimnik suggest how the winners of the 2020 election are attempting to rewrite the history of Russiagate. Having been debunked and rebuked by their own investigators, the conspiracists are taking a second bite at the poisoned apple. Using anonymous sources to make unsubstantiated charges in the nation's most influential news outlets, they are seeking to punish people for the crime of exposing their malfeasance.
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May 20, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClearPolitics.com,
The Biden administration is vigorously pursuing key figures from the phony Trump/Russia collusion scandal that roiled the nation for four years. But instead of trying to punish the liars who perpetrated that fraud, it is targeting the truth-tellers who challenged and exposed the conspiracy to negate the 2016 election.
Working from the same playbook used to smear dozens of Trump associates, the administration and its allies are planting stories based on blind quotes in friendly media outlets to seek revenge.
On April 16, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported that the Justice Department is investigating Kash Patel – who had worked with Rep. Devin Nunes and later the Trump administration to reveal the Russiagate hoax – for the "possible improper disclosure of classified information." Ignatius said he received the tip from "two knowledgeable sources" who "wouldn't provide additional details."
Violating the bedrock principles of American justice and journalism, this article is an exercise in thuggery as the government uses a powerful media outlet to intimidate and besmirch a citizen without evidence. With nothing to respond to, how can Patel defend himself? If Patel is lucky, the federal government has only placed a sharp sword over his head that may not fall. If not, he might be dragged into a lengthy court battle that could drain his finances and also cost him his freedom.
We don't know if Patel broke the law, but note that the administration has shown no interest in pursuing former FBI leaders such as James Comey and Andrew McCabe , who improperly disclosed information regarding Russiagate.
Trump's former lawyer Rudolph Giuliani is also in the "cross hairs of a federal criminal investigation," according to an April 29 article in New York Times that relied on "people with knowledge of the matter."
At issue, those anonymous sources say, is whether Giuliani was serving two masters when he counseled Trump to remove Marie L. Yovanovitch as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in 2019. "Did Mr. Giuliani go after Ms. Yovanovitch solely on behalf of Mr. Trump, who was his client at the time?" the Times reports. "Or was he also doing so on behalf of the Ukrainian officials, who wanted her removed for their own reasons?"
I'll leave it to the lawyers to determine the wisdom of bringing a case based on the parsing of tangled motives. What is clear is that the FBI is taking a thumb-screws page from the playbook of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who deployed the little-used Foreign Agents Registration Act to pursue the white whale of collusion. As Lee Smith reported for RealClearInvestigations , just three people had pleaded guilty to FARA violations in the half-century before Mueller deployed it to pressure and punish Trump allies.
And note, the FBI's zeal to crack down on unregistered foreign agents does not extend to the president's son Hunter Biden, who, Paul Sperry reported for RCI, "failed to register as a foreign agent while promoting the interests of foreign business partners in Washington, including brokering meetings with his father and other government officials." It appears that we have two tiers of justice: one for Biden administration enemies, another for its family and friends.
The targeting of Giuliani looks especially suspect and politically motivated after three main news outlets that have driven much of the false Russiagate coverage – the New York Times, Washington Post and NBC News – were forced to correct a recent story , once again based on anonymous sources, claiming the FBI had warned Giuliani in 2019 "that he was a target of a Russian disinformation campaign during his efforts to dig up unflattering information about then-candidate Joe Biden in 2019." Giuliani was never given such a briefing.
Considering the numerous instances in which the press published bogus information from "informed sources" during Russiagate, one has to ask why they continue to serve as vehicles for falsehoods. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me a dozen times and you're not fooling me – we're acting in concert. As RCI editor Tom Kuntz has argued, journalistic integrity demands, at the very least, that these organizations tell their audience who exactly had misled them. Confidentiality agreements should not protect liars.
A third example of the Biden administration's effort to punish Russiagate figures is its renewed effort to put former Manafort associate Konstantin V. Kilimnik behind bars. In an extensive new article for RCI, Aaron Maté reports that the Treasury Department provided no evidence to support its recent claim that Kilimnik is a "known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf." It also refuses to explain how it was able to discover the truth of Kilimnik's identity, which the two most extensive Russiagate investigations – the 448-page Muller report and the 966-page Senate Intelligence report – failed to uncover.
This absence of evidence has not stopped the peddlers of the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory from claiming vindication. Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff casts Treasury's unsubstantiated claim as smoking-gun evidence of collusion. The New York Times reports that the claim demonstrates that "there had been numerous interactions between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence during the year before the [2016] election."
Who needs proof when the government says it's so?
The FBI is also putting the screws to Kilimnik, offering $250,000 for information leading to his arrest on witness-tampering charges involving text messages he sent in 2018 to two people who have only been identified as "potential witnesses" involving Manafort's lobbying work for Ukraine, not Russiagate.
In an exclusive interview, Kilimnik told Maté, "I don't understand how two messages to our old partners who helped us get out the message about Ukraine's integration aspirations in [the] EU, and asking them to get in touch with Paul, can be interpreted as 'intimidation' or 'obstruction of justice.'"
Maté also reports that the $250,000 bounty on Kilimnik is more than double the amount the FBI is offering for information leading to the arrest of murder suspects.
The Biden administration's campaigns against Patel, Giuliani and Kilimnik suggest how the winners of the 2020 election are attempting to rewrite the history of Russiagate. Having been debunked and rebuked by their own investigators, the conspiracists are taking a second bite at the poisoned apple. Using anonymous sources to make unsubstantiated charges in the nation's most influential news outlets, they are seeking to punish people for the crime of exposing their malfeasance.
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May 16, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Liz Cheney Lied About Her Role In Spreading The Discredited CIA "Russian Bounty" Story BY TYLER DURDEN SUNDAY, MAY 16, 2021 - 11:30 AM
Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com ,
In an interview with Fox News ' Bret Baier this week, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) denied that she spread the discredited CIA "Russian bounty" story. That CIA tale, claiming Russia was paying Taliban fighters to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan, was cooked up by the CIA and then published by The New York Times on June 27 of last year, right as former President Trump announced his plans to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. The Times story, citing anonymous intelligence officials, was then continually invoked by pro-war Republicans and Democrats -- led by Cheney -- to justify their blocking of that troop withdrawal. The story was discredited when the U.S. intelligence community admitted last month that it had only "low to moderate confidence" that any of this even happened.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) speaks to members of the media after she was removed of her leadership role as Conference Chair, following a Republican House caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol on on May 12, 2021 in Washington, DC (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)When Baier asked Cheney about her role in spreading this debunked CIA story, Cheney blatantly lied to him, claiming "if you go back and look at what I said -- every single thing I said : I said if those stories are true , we need to know why the President and Vice President were not briefed on them." After Baier pressed her on the fact that she vested this story with credibility, Cheney insisted a second time that she never endorsed the claim but merely spoke conditionally, always using the "if these reports are true" formulation. Watch Cheney deny her role in spreading that story.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Fd6u_p0K9aE
Liz Cheney, as she so often does, blatantly lied. That she merely spoke of the Russian bounty story in the conditional -- " every single thing I said: I said if those stories are true" -- is completely and demonstrably false. Indeed, other than Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) , there are few if any members of Congress who did more to spread this Russian bounty story as proven truth, all in order to block troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. In so doing, she borrowed from a pro-war playbook pioneered by her dad, to whom she owes her career: the former Vice President would leak CIA claims to The New York Times to justify war, then go on Meet the Press with Tim Russert, as he did on September 8, 2002 , and cite those New York Times reports as though they were independent confirmation of his views coming from that paper rather than from him:
MR. RUSSERT: What, specifically, has [Saddam] obtained that you believe would enhance his nuclear development program? ..
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Now, in the case of a nuclear weapon, that means either plutonium or highly enriched uranium. And what we've seen recently that has raised our level of concern to the current state of unrest, if you will, if I can put it in those terms, is that he now is trying, through his illicit procurement network, to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to enrich uranium to make the bombs.
MR. RUSSERT: Aluminum tubes.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Specifically aluminum tubes. There's a story in The New York Times this morning this is -- I don't -- and I want to attribute The Times . I don't want to talk about, obviously, specific intelligence sources, but it's now public that, in fact, [Saddam] has been seeking to acquire, and we have been able to intercept and prevent him from acquiring through this particular channel, the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge. And the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly enriched uranium, which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb.
So having CIA stories leak to the press that fuel the pro-war case, then having pro-war politicians cite those to justify their pro-war position, is a Cheney Family speciality.
On July 1, the House Armed Services Committee, of which Rep. Cheney is a member, debated amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act, the bill that authorized $740.5 billion in military spending. One of Cheney's top priorities was to align with the Committee's pro-war Democrats, funded by weapons manufacturers, to block Trump's plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2020 and to withdraw roughly 1/3 of the 34,000 U.S. troops in Germany.
To justify her opposition, Cheney -- contrary to what she repeatedly insisted to Baier -- cited the CIA's Russian bounty story without skepticism . In a joint statement with Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, that Cheney published on her website on June 27 -- the same day that The New York Times published its first story about the CIA tale -- Cheney pronounced herself "concerned about Russian activity in Afghanistan, including reports that they have targeted U.S. forces." There was nothing conditional about the statement: they were preparing to block troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and cited this story as proof that "Russia does not wish us well in Afghanistan."
After today's briefing with senior White House officials, we remain concerned about Russian activity in Afghanistan, including reports that they have targeted U.S. forces. It has been clear for some time that Russia does not wish us well in Afghanistan. We believe it is important to vigorously pursue any information related to Russia or any other country targeting our forces. Congress has no more important obligation than providing for the security of our nation and ensuring our forces have the resources they need.
An even more definitive use of this Russia bounty story came when Cheney held a press conference to explain her opposition to Trump's plans to withdraw troops. In this statement, she proclaimed that she "remains concerned about Russian activities in Afghanistan." She then explicitly threatened Russia over the CIA's "bounty" story, warning them that "any targeting of U.S. forces by Russians, by anyone else, will face a very swift and deadly response." She then gloated about the U.S. bombing of Russia-linked troops in Syria in 2018 using what she called "overwhelming and lethal force," and warned that this would happen again if they target U.S. forces in Afghanistan:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/_NUXZog_Vf0
Does this sound even remotely like what Cheney claimed to Baier? She denied having played a key role in spreading the Russia bounty story because, as she put it, " every single thing I said, I said: if those stories are true." She also told him that she never referred to that CIA claim except by saying: "if these reports are true." That is false.
The issue is not merely that Cheney lied: that would hardly be news. It is that the entire media narrative about Cheney's removal from her House leadership role is a fraud. Her attacks on Trump and her party leadership were not confined to criticisms of the role played by the former president in contesting the validity of the 2020 election outcome or inciting the January 6 Capitol riot -- because Liz Cheney is such a stalwart defender of the need for truth and adherence to the rule of law in politics.
Cheney played the key role in forming an alliance with pro-war Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee to repeatedly defeat the bipartisan anti-war minority [led by Ro Khanna (D-CA), Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL)] to prevent any meaningful changes promised by Trump during the 2016 campaign to put an end to the U.S. posture of Endless War. As I reported about the House Armed Services Committee hearing last July, the CIA tale was repeatedly cited by Cheney and her allies to justify ongoing U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan.
Cheney is motivated by power, not ethics. In 2016, Trump ran -- and won -- by explicitly inveighing against the Bush/Cheney foreign policy of endless war, militarism and imperialism that Liz Cheney, above all else, still vehemently supports. What she is attempting to do is reclaim the Republican Party and deliver it back to the neocons and warmongers who dominated it under her father's reign. She is waging an ideological battle, not an ethical one, for control of the Republican Party.
That will be a debate for Republican voters to resolve. In the meantime, Liz Cheney cannot be allowed to distance herself from the CIA's fairy tale about Russians in Afghanistan. Along with pro-war Democrats, she used this conveniently leaked CIA story repeatedly to block troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. And just as her father taught her to do -- by example if not expressly -- she is now lying to distance herself from a pro-war CIA script that she, in fact, explicitly promoted.
For those who have not seen it, I produced a one-hour video report last July on how and why the House Armed Services Committee succeeded in enacting virtually every pro-war amendment they considered and how this was accomplished through an alliance between Liz Cheney and her neocon GOP allies on the one hand, and pro-war, Raytheon-funded Democrats on the other:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/ejqYrzEX14E https://youtu.be/ejqYrzEX14E
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rosalinda 8 hours ago
Demologos 7 hours agoCircular politics, who knew? Happens all the time. 'Leak' a story to a paper that for sure will publish it, and quote that very same story to push whatever it is you, or more precisely, your backers, want. Nobody wants war, why is the US spending almost $1T on defense? Nobody else is spending that kind of money, the MIC is able to force down whatever it wants on the compliant press, and gullible public
vic and blood PREMIUM 7 hours ago remove linkLiz Cheney is carrying daddy's water. This is why there should have been war crimes trials for the fake wars promoted by the neocons for the benefit of the Wall Street/London/MIC complex. If Daddy Darth had swung from a rope we wouldn't be dealing with the current mess.
You can blame the fake news media for the lack of consequences. When they want to, they can take a thimble full of bad behavior and turn it into an Olympic size pool of condemnation and character assassination. They were given an Olympic size pool of outright lies and corruption related to the illegal wars and didn't see anything that offended their sense of human decency and justice. But a thug dies in the street and the fake news machine turns him into the national martyr for systemic racism.
Pernicious Gold Phallusy 7 hours agoLook at how many RINOs are swamp creatures who establish residency in lower population states, where campaign cash goes further.
**** Cheney was a swamp creature and fake Wyoming person, just like Liz Cheney.
pndr4495 7 hours agoMcCain did that in the 1970s. Abandoned his wheelchair-bound wife and his kids, then married a rich drug addict in a new State.
vic and blood PREMIUM 7 hours ago remove linkAs I have repeated many times here on ZH, a politician is not seriously concerned about representing the constituents. The politician is busy with reprenting his/her own interests, especially the financial interest.
HAL9000rev1 7 hours ago (Edited)Liz Cheney is a perfect example of how little the neocons differ from the neolibs. They are the same thing with different cynical marketing strategies.
freedommusic 8 hours ago (Edited)The roots of neocon philosophy is Trotskyism. Neocons are left/right agnostic, they latch on to which ever political party in power.
perpetual war/perpetual revolution is thier stratagy
Paul Bunyan 8 hours ago remove linkLanguage was invented so people can lie.
Politics was invented so people can make a career out of lying.
Pretty Like an Ugly Girl 7 hours agoLanguage was invented to communicate, but yes, people take advantage.
Ms No PREMIUM 7 hours agoI confess that in 2001, and until about 2008, I was part of the crowd that bought the whole ******* line. Then with Obama I fell for the ******** that it's better to vote for the lesser of two evils.
Then I started watching the countless documentaries on 911 that show the official 911 report is a bigger concoction of horse**** than the Warren Report. Here's the definitive documentary, for any searchers out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DOnAn_PX6M
The thing about Cheney back in the day is that he seemed like the most credible/reasonable man in government. I remember after he debated Joe Lieberman how everybody wished they were both at the tops of their tickets.
Bottom line is we believe what aligns with what we want to believe, and they know it, and they took down the towers knowing the majority of the US would be willing to go to war with the entire world if need be.
Folks who think the covid scam or the stolen election was the beginning of the breakdown haven't been paying attention. The people haven't been in control of their country for a long, long time, if ever.
wellwaddyaknow 7 hours agoThere are anti-human mimicks born, psychopaths, that literally have to study human emotion, learn it and parrot it. That's why when one watches you, especially at first encounter, it's so intense.
They are analyzing your every facial crease and body language trying to decode the human and what it all means. When they lie they will sometimes pause to do this to see if it's fully taking. They often can't tell if what they are saying is too absurd, they wait for you to show them. They develop this skill over time.
What's even creepier, is that since they don't use empathy capacity and other human tendencies, that brain capacity becomes devoted to their predatory nature, analyzing, imitating and being phony. So they are damn near preternatural at it. They know your weaknesses and needs immediately.
In addition to their dead, intense analyzing stare, they don't recognize that their stare is too intense and that they often get too close. Like if this fatty had halitosis for example, she would always just be at least a little too close to you. They don't understand what it is about people that wants space They don't have that feeling either. When you squirm and try to get away, they won't notice or care, unless they are doing it on purpose to intimidate. They can also lie with ease, because they don't have any of those things that makes people moral. They are simply annoyances to them. It pisses them off that they have to pretend to care.
So in other words, the CIA makes sht up, floats it out there in the direction of dumb gullible compromised power hungry members of congress, and then wait to see who picks it up and smells it.
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May 12, 2021 | www.wsj.com
Reds under the bed? Or forgot to take the antipsychotics today? D David Keating
For any fairly recent US posters on this site, here is a hint to the wise.Reds under the bed? Or forgot to take the antipsychotics today? D David KeatingThere is a significant Russian presence on the WSJ comments. Basically our Russian visitors dominate these comments - at a ratio perhaps of 8-1 - or even worse.
The best way to get your footing on this site is to understand that these Russians are educated, fluent in English, knowledgeable about us, oftentimes quite funny ( sometimes not. ) And the Russians are seeking to pass as Americans.
In this capacity, the Russians will often be earnest & insightful. As well as say horrible things about Republicans and about Democrats.
They are here to stoke division and conflict. They seek to amplify partisanship and misinformation.
As soon as you understand these essential facts, you will find it quite easy to work the thread.
For any fairly recent US posters on this site, here is a hint to the wise.There is a significant Russian presence on the WSJ comments. Basically our Russian visitors dominate these comments - at a ratio perhaps of 8-1 - or even worse.
The best way to get your footing on this site is to understand that these Russians are educated, fluent in English, knowledgeable about us, oftentimes quite funny ( sometimes not. ) And the Russians are seeking to pass as Americans.
In this capacity, the Russians will often be earnest & insightful. As well as say horrible things about Republicans and about Democrats.
They are here to stoke division and conflict. They seek to amplify partisanship and misinformation.
As soon as you understand these essential facts, you will find it quite easy to work the thread.
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May 12, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Taibbi: Reporters Once Challenged The Spy State. Now, They're Agents Of It BY TYLER DURDEN WEDNESDAY, MAY 12, 2021 - 04:20 PM
Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News ,
What a difference a decade makes.
Former CIA director John Brennan was a media villain, now he's media himself.Just over ten years ago, on July 25, 2010, Wikileaks released 75,000 secret U.S. military reports involving the war in Afghanistan . The New York Times, The Guardian , and Der Spiegel helped release the documents, which were devastating to America's intelligence community and military, revealing systemic abuses that included civilian massacres and an assassination squad, TF 373, whose existence the United States kept "protected " even from its allies.
The Afghan War logs came out at the beginning of a historic stretch of true oppositional journalism, when outlets like Le Monde, El Pais, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, The New York Times, and others partnered with sites like Wikileaks. Official secrets were exposed on a scale not seen since the Church Committee hearings of the seventies, as reporters pored through 250,000 American diplomatic cables, secret files about every detainee at Guantanamo Bay, and hundreds of thousands of additional documents about everything from the Iraq war to coverups of environmental catastrophes, among other things helping trigger the "Arab Spring."
There was an attempt at a response -- companies like Amazon, Master Card, Visa, and Paypal shut Wikileaks off, and the Pentagon flooded the site with a "denial of service" attack -- but leaks continued. One person inspired by the revelations was former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who came forward to unveil an illegal domestic surveillance program, a story that won an Oscar and a Pulitzer Prize for documentarian Laura Poitras and reporters Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill. By 2014, members of Congress in both parties were calling for the resignations of CIA chief John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom had been caught lying to congress.
The culmination of this period came when billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar launched The Intercept in February 2014. The outlet was devoted to sifting through Snowden's archive of leaked secrets, and its first story described how the NSA and CIA frequently made errors using geolocation to identify and assassinate drone targets. A few months later, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden admitted, "We kill people based on metadata."
Fast forward seven years. Julian Assange is behind bars, and may die there. Snowden is in exile in Russia. Brennan, Clapper, and Hayden have been rehabilitated and are all paid contributors to either MSNBC or CNN, part of a wave of intelligence officers who've flooded the airwaves and op-ed pages in recent years, including the FBI's Asha Rangappa, Clint Watts, Josh Campbell, former counterintelligence chief Frank Figliuzzi and former deputy director Andrew McCabe, the CIA's John Sipher, Phil Mudd, Ned Price, and many others.
Once again, Internet platforms, credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard , and payment processors like PayPal are working to help track down and/or block the activities of "extremists." This time, they're on the same side as the onetime press allies of Wikileaks and Snowden, who began a course reversal after the election of Donald Trump.
Those outlets first began steering attention away from intelligence abuses and toward bugbears like Trumpism, misinformation, and Russian meddling, then entered into partnerships with Langley-approved facsimiles of leak sites like Hamilton 68 , New Knowledge , and especially Bellingcat , a kind of reverse Wikileaks devoted to exposing the misdeeds of regimes in Russia, Syria, and Iran -- less so the United States and its allies. The CIA's former deputy chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia, Marc Polymeropolous, said of the group's work, " I don't want to be too dramatic, but we love this ."
After the Capitol riots of January 6th, the War on Terror came home, and "domestic extremists" stepped into the role enemy combatants played before. George Bush once launched an all-out campaign to pacify any safe haven for trrrsts, promising to "smoke 'em out of their holes." The new campaign is aimed at stamping out areas for surveillance-proof communication, which CNN security analyst and former DHS official Juliette Kayyem described as any online network "that lets [domestic extremists] talk amongst themselves."
Reporters pledged assistance, snooping for evidence of wrongness in digital rather than geographical "hidey holes." We've seen The Guardian warning about the perils of podcasts , ProPublica arguing that Apple's lax speech environment contributed to the January 6th riot, and reporters from The Verge and Vice and The New York Times listening in to Clubhouse chats in search of evidence of dangerous thought. In an inspired homage to the lunacy of the War on Terror years, a GQ writer even went on Twitter last week to chat with the author of George Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech about imploring the "authorities" to use the "Fire in a Crowded Theater" argument to shut down Fox News.
Multiple outlets announced plans to track "extremists" in either open or implied cooperation with authorities. Frontline, ProPublica , and Berkley Journalism's Investigative Reporting Program used " high-precision digital forensics " to uncover "evidence" about the Boogaloo Bois, and the Huffington Post worked with the "sedition hunters " at the Twitter activist group "Deep State Dogs" to help identify a suspect later arrested for tasering a Capitol police officer. One of the Huffington Post stories, from February, not only spoke to a willingness of the press to work with law enforcement, but impatience with the slowness of official procedure compared to "sleuthing communities":
The FBI wants photos of Capitol insurrections to go viral , and has published images of more than 200 suspects. But what happens when online sleuthing communities identify suspects and then see weeks go by without any signs of action ? There are hundreds of suspects, thousands of hours of video, hundreds of thousands of tips, and millions of pieces of evidence the FBI's bureaucracy isn't necessarily designed to keep organized.
The Intercept already saw founding members Poitras and Greenwald depart, and shut down the aforementioned Snowden archive to, in their words, "focus on other editorial priorities" -- parent company First Look Media soon after launched a partnership with "PassionFlix," whose motto is, " Turning your favorite romance novels into movies and series ." Last week, they announced a new project in tune with current media trends:
Are there legitimate stories about people with racist or conspiratorial views who for instance shouldn't be working in positions of authority, as cops or elected officials or military officers? Sure, and there's a job for reporters in proving that out, especially if there's a record of complaints or corruption to match. It gets a little weird if the newsworthiness standard is "person with a job has abhorrent private opinions," but it's not like it's impossible that a legit story could be found in something like the Gab archive, especially if it involves a public figure.
But that depends on the media people involved having a coherent standard for outing subjects, which hasn't always (or even often) been the case.
Here The Intercept is announcing it considers QAnon devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alex Jones "violent white supremacists" -- they're a lot of things, but "violent white supremacists"? In the first piece about "extremists" on Gab, reporter Micah Lee claimed to have found an account belonging to a little-known conservative youth figure; the man's attorney later reached out to deny the account was his, leading to a correction . When asked about his process, Lee responded, sarcastically, that he "certainly wouldn't want to accidentally do investigative journalism about white supremacist domestic terrorists." When asked how he defined a terrorist, and if he'd be naming public figures only, the sarcastic answer this time was, "Of course I won't be naming anyone. Racist white people must be defended at all costs."
Greenwald left the organization among other things after an editor asked that he address the "disinformation issue" in a piece about Hunter Biden's laptop, a reference to a claim made by 50 intelligence officers that the story had "the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign." He found it inappropriate then for a publication with The Intercept's history to be pushing an intelligence narrative, and the Gab project struck him in a similar way.
"The leap from disseminating CIA propaganda to doing the police work of security state agencies is a short one," says Greenwald, "and with its statements about what they are doing with this Gab archive, The Intercept and its trite liberal managers in New York have now taken it."
Read the rest here . .. play_arrow
safelyG 1 hour ago
ted41776 1 hour ago remove linkwe need to find a way to keep stories like this from being reported.
lovingly,
rachel maddow's wifeLt. Shicekopf 1 hour agothey hate us for our freedumb
was anyone punished for that WMD lie that cause the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and a few thousand US troops?
i mean it is a widely accepted fact now, isn't it? that it was a lie that caused a genocide and deaths of hundreds of thousands of people?
where are the nuremberg trials? UN? anyone?
crickets
Maltheus 1 hour ago remove linkOperation Mockingbird has paid immense dividends, one of the most successful programs ever.
fishpoem 32 minutes agoI dunno. What's the name of the program to infiltrate the schools? Gives Mockingbird a run for its money.
Argon1 1 hour agoUse the titles of any of the books written by members of the Frankfurt School. Start with Marcuse. How such circular reasoning, boring prose, and patently bogus arguments became mandatory reading material in every college in America is a puzzle future historians will have to unravel.
Well, if the ruling Marxist Democrats allow historians to exist in the future...which they probably won't. Truth, in that era, will be what "art" became in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia: cliched state-worship.
Wait. Isn't that what we've already got?
DesertEagle 37 minutes agotedstr 57 minutes agoMost of the "reporters" for the big media cartel were always enemies of the American people.
Steve in Greensboro 1 hour ago remove linkNews organizations have always been agents of the IC. Just as they are agents of Hollywood and the biz news are agents of corporations. They no longer have the staffs to truely "do news" so they rely on being spoon fed from their sources. they will never bite the hand.
Joe Davola 1 hour agoLee Smith on Bannon's Warroom 53 in December 2019.
Lee Smith: " Here's something that boggles me still that there are still people after what we have seen and after I've documented in the book what the press has become what the WaPo what the prestige brands of American journalism have become and nonetheless there are Republicans only blocks from here who are more than happy to treat whether it's the WaPo, NYT, CNN, MSNBC as though these are regular news networks still. Even after three years of seeing them operate exactly like media operatives "
Steve Bannon: "You believe they are the opposition party media. Right?
Lee Smith: "It's not a media, it's a platform for intelligence operations. It's not media at all. This is like the Arab press."
NewMouldy 1 hour agoMaybe a curious investigative reporter might look into why "financial services" companies jump right in whenever the deep state needs them.
US Banana Republic 6 minutes agoKabuki theatre..
College deans, professors, teachers were all bought and paid for decades ago by the deep state. The very people that educate upcoming politicians, reporters and scientists.
This is how we got to where we are now.
Isn't Life Gland 15 minutes agoWhen media "personalities" like Cuomo, Madcow, and Cooper make more than $10 million dollars a year from corporate sponsors towing the corporate/government line then NOBODY want to be a hard hitting investigative reporter. Everybody wants to be a corporate/government boot licker.
As always, follow the money.
Ali Watkins is my favorite. "Worked" her way all the way up to the pinnacle gig at the New York Crimes..on her back.
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May 10, 2021 | www.rt.com
A cyberattack that crippled the US fuel supply wasn't the work of Russia, President Joe Biden said. Confusingly, Biden then said that Russia bears "some responsibility" for the attack.
A ransomware attack on Friday shut down a gasoline and diesel pipeline running 5,500 miles along the entire US East Coast. Operated by the Colonial Pipeline Company, the vital fuel artery normally transits 100 million gallons per day from Texas all the way to New York. The Biden administration responded by invoking emergency powers to enable truckers to transport more fuel, as traders scrambled to import fuel by sea from Europe.
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Home USA News Biden says 'no evidence' Russia responsible for pipeline cyberattack but Russia has 'some responsibility' 10 May, 2021 19:52 Get short URLJoe Biden speaks on the Colonial Pipeline attack as Vice President Kamala Harris stands by at the White House in Washington, DC, May 10, 2021 © Reuters / Kevin Lamarque 14 Follow RT on
A cyberattack that crippled the US fuel supply wasn't the work of Russia, President Joe Biden said. Confusingly, Biden then said that Russia bears "some responsibility" for the attack.
A ransomware attack on Friday shut down a gasoline and diesel pipeline running 5,500 miles along the entire US East Coast. Operated by the Colonial Pipeline Company, the vital fuel artery normally transits 100 million gallons per day from Texas all the way to New York. The Biden administration responded by invoking emergency powers to enable truckers to transport more fuel, as traders scrambled to import fuel by sea from Europe.
ALSO ON RT.COM Reported cyberattack on major US pipeline sends oil & gasoline prices higherAddressing the attack on Monday, Biden initially threw cold water on the claims of Russian involvement, instead blaming "transnational criminals."
"So far there's no evidence from our intelligence people that Russia is involved," Biden told reporters. However, he followed that statement by saying that the ransomware used "is in Russia," and Russia therefore has "some responsibility to deal with this."
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1391819003560144900&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fusa%2F523420-biden-colonial-pipeline-russia-responsiblity%2F&sessionId=8bea10ea6256a9d086ef25229613f3d67d97cfb5&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px
Rumors of Russian involvement were stoked by several mainstream media outlets over the weekend, after it emerged that 'DarkSide,' a criminal hacking organization believed by CNN's anonymous sources to be based in "a Russian-speaking country," was responsible for the attack. In a short statement on Monday, the FBI confirmed "that the DarkSide ransomware is responsible for the compromise of the Colonial Pipeline networks."
Other media outlets took the opportunity to link the hackers to the Russian government, "whether they work for the state or not," in the words of one cybersecurity consultant to NBC.
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May 09, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
psychohistorian , May 5 2021 19:47 utc | 85
Below is a repeat of a Glenn Diesen quote from karlof1 comment # 57
"
"As the world has become more complex, people have relied more and more on stereotypes and simplifications to help them interpret and filter events around them. Propaganda manipulates this desire for simplicity – handing people easy answers rather than winning them over with rational arguments. Society then rallies around these stereotypes and squashes dissents with 'herd mentality', an irrational set of psychological behaviors where individuals are swept along with a group, overriding their own rational assessments."
"Think about the vaccine situation and what just happened to the medical profession in the West....they got railroaded into agreeing that there was not an off the shelf "ivermectin" to the virus and guaranteed future income to Big Pharma is more important.
Hey docs!!! Do no harm! Your complicity in this war crime against humanity is noted. What are the responsible and humanistic actions to take now and why does the public not see evidence that you are organizing to do them?
karlof1 , May 5 2021 19:50 utc | 86
Until the reality of the CIA--to undermine peaceful relations and promote wars required for Military Keynesianism--is taught in grade school, it will always find recruits. As with the FBI, government sponsored propaganda was and remains required to manufacture the reasons for their existence. Nations that promote an equitable polity have no need for a secret police force, but do need some force to counter attempts from the outside to foment destabilization. For example, today's Russia is freer than at any previous time in its history as only extremist ideologies are banned while Communism--still deemed extremist by the West--is relegated to a normal ideology with status as a normative political party. Indeed, I'd argue that Russia remains the only genuine Liberal Western nation, which is a reality Russophobes are unable to accept or even contemplate. The same also applies to the concept of Communism thanks to the unwillingness to even attempt to understand Marx. And as Western thought gets subsumed by Wokeness, the ideological divide between Neoliberal nations and all others will continue to grow.
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May 09, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
librul , May 5 2021 18:00 utc | 61
re: Wokism
My two cents. People are mimics. It is fascinating when you realize this.
People don't muse, contemplate and chew over the circumstances and issues in their environment and then resolve - "aha! I have got it." That is not where people get their belief systems. For example, a million and more people didn't all independently study the Bible and then realize that their interpretation was fully consistent with those of the Roman Catholics and therefore they should go join the Catholic Church.
No, people get their belief systems (religious, political, economic, cultural) from their identity groups. **Then** (if called upon) they apply the intellect to rationalize the beliefs that they **already** hold.
The epiphany came to me when I observed intelligent people falling for Russiagate. WTF !! I thought intelligent people would get it. Russiagate would be a flash-in-the-pan that would disappear in a few days (or less!). Boy was I wrong. The intellect does not rule, group identity does. Those that identified Democrat (generalizing here, of course) fell in step with the beliefs common to Democrats, including Russiagate.
Rationalizing the Russiagate nonsense was seemingly inevitable with the 24/7 help of the MSM, and the continuous chirping of Democrat politicians. The intellect was not a lighthouse beacon that led intelligent Democrats through the fog of 24/7/52 issued propaganda, rather; the intellect was the tool that solidified vaporous forms into false-reality.
To find one's identity in groups is deeply human. People are dominated by their need to be group-accepted. It is unsurprising that group acceptance and group identity produce what we call fashion - fashion in style, fashion in vocabulary, fashion in beliefs. This applies to Wokism. People are mimics.
You can even get them to wear Pussy Hats.
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May 09, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
EoinW , May 5 2021 15:38 utc | 25
BrainRinsed | May 5 2021 15:20 utc | 15
Was it silly of us to think the Woke revolutionaires would get enough "bang for their buck" with trannie washrooms? Despite winning every battle in the culture war, the Looney Left is never satisfied. What's scary is the latest front they've opened: the Covid reformation of western society.
They won't have trouble finding 21st century Jews to de-humanize. Just label someone a Covid Denier or Anti Vaxxer and anything will go!
A nice sentiment to think the Woke cancer can rot the CIA or US military. Afraid we've got bigger problems than that.
William Gruff , May 5 2021 18:13 utc | 65
corvo , May 5 2021 18:23 utc | 70The CIA is not "testosterone saturated" . Quite the opposite. From its inception it has recruited an unusual number of closeted homosexuals. This somewhat makes sense in that a gay who is in the closet, particularly the less LGBTQWERTY-friendly culture of the 1950s that the CIA arose in, will already have experience being being less than forthright with their intentions. Such individuals can also be blackmailed more easily should their employer find the need.
While things have changed in American society and being outed as gay is no longer the social death sentence that it used to be, the gayness had already established itself as part of the internal culture of The Company and so it persists.
Do not equate a psychotic enthusiasm for harming others with testosterone. They are not a bunch of Rambos; more like a gang of Norman Bates.
William Gruff , May 5 2021 14:50 utc | 5William Gruff @65:
Testosterone level has nothing to do with sexual orientation. Psychiatry tried dosing male homosexuals with testosterone in the 1950s and 1960s to make them "manly"; this served only to increase their (homosexual) sex drive and, not surprisingly, their aggressiveness. Similarly, there's no correlation between where one lies on the Kinsey scale and one's testosterone leve .
Your description of the CIA's use of homosexual agents during that time period, however, is spot on. One might add that the CIA (and other agencies; just consider the kind of character who ran the FBI at the time) may have valued the kind of talent for duplicity and secrecy that the homosexually-inclined had to nurture from an early age.
Et Tu , May 5 2021 14:58 utc | 10"Generalized anxiety disorder" is what people who have a poor working relationship with reality often suffer from. The anxiety arises from the divergence of what they believe the world to be from what they perceive about the world with their senses. It is a permanent state of cognitive dissonance. The "woke" believe that the cure for this disorder is to create "safe spaces" where exposure to elements of the real world that trigger the cognitive dissonance can be banned and cancelled. It is an undeclared goal of the "woke" to extend these "safe space" reality exclusion zones to encompass the entire planet.
Naturally, that goal is only attainable within the fantasy spaces of the "woke" reality exclusion zones themselves, and those zones can only exist due to the pity and forbearance of the rest of the population. Currently the reality exclusion zones only encompass educational establishments (primary and secondary schools; university campuses), some government agencies, and some non-industrial workplaces (mass media, marketing, other strictly white collar enterprises).
Remember the "Havana Syndrome" , where CIA spooks under diplomatic cover at various US embassies, but mainly the one in Cuba, developed psychogenic illnesses because they were convinced that they were being zapped by Soviet mind rays? This is the result of taking individuals who already suffer from emotional and psychological damage like the cisgender millennial in the linked CIA advertisement and placing them in postings where they are absolutely convinced that they are completely surrounded by hostile enemies. Their delusion and paranoia feed off each other. Then, for the first time they hear crickets unlike anything they ever experienced in their gated, manicured, bug-sprayed northern Virginia wealthy suburbs and their already fractured mind shatters the rest of the way.
When you recall that the CIA is the "Mighty Wurlitzer" ; the conductor of the orchestra of mass media narratives, it becomes clear why outfits like the
New YorkLangley Times, theWashingtonBezos Post, the C IA N ews N etwork and such have been going off the rails with their absurd narratives these last several years.jared , May 5 2021 15:20 utc | 16Yeah, that has to be one of the most hare brained Psyop fails ever. The US is a world leader alright, in mental retardation and lack of self awareness.
Identity politics and wokeness meets imperialism. Makes you wonder how much longer they can unironically continue calling themselves 'intelligence' agencies.
Consistent with other brilliant 'Born in the USA', ideologically spawned own goals, like bank deregulation, privatising the military, legalising bribes in politics, incentivising every idiot to own a gun, de-industrialising and outsourcing production in China, and the inevitable coup de grace in waiting, leveraging the Dollar's status as reserve currency to impose sanctions... because... exceptionalism and indispensability are just eternal, universally accepted virtues apparently.
If learning from mistakes makes us wiser, one can expect more than a few Buddhas of sorts to emerge from the US in a generation or 3. Would not want to be there in the time between though, it's bound to be a rough ride.
vk , May 5 2021 15:28 utc | 18Being juvenile, insane, self-obsensed
would not preclude them from being dangerous.Really, on the whole and in various ways, the CIA acts against american interests.
But certainly in the interest of some.Empire of Perfidious Albion.
Seward , May 5 2021 15:37 utc | 24Contrary to what recent history might suggest, the CIA was founded by, and has always served as the upper-middle-class/bourgeois center-left bastion within the USG. During the Cold War, it was probably the main employer of Yale graduates, specially from the Literature bachelor. A running joke during the Cold War was that the CIA was the the world's highest concentration of failed writers.
The reason for that is very simple: its predecessor - the OSS - organically evolved during WWII as the repository for the sons of the Northeastern elite who wanted to experience the thrills of war without incurring the risk of death. By the time WWII ended, the OSS was essentially an Ivy League fraternity.
I worked there 10 fiscal years as a computer-systems contractor, 20 years ago. Interacted with a lot of Government types. Seemed to me a huge bureaucracy, then, drowning in paperwork. Surprised if the whole place ever got anything done.
One oddity: people that went overseas, called DO then, absolutely mission critical, who often used initials for last names (worked with a "Steven P." once), got shafted for promotions when abroad: out of sight, out of mind. Often paired in offices back here, below the grade required for individual offices. Reputed to live high on the hog when away, but not back home.
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May 03, 2021 | www.rt.com
Scott Ritter
is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ' SCORPION KING : America's Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.' He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter 28 Apr, 2021 20:44 Get short URL
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines speaks during a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing about worldwide threats © Reuters The Director of National Intelligence has ostensibly created a new “center†for the sharing and analysis of information and intelligence about foreign interference in US elections. Its real focus is much more nefarious.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) announced in a statement on Monday that it was creating a new intelligence “center†focused on tracking so-called “ foreign malign influence, †reported Politico. This new entity, known as the Foreign Malign Influence Center, was mandated in the recent intelligence and defense budget authorization acts, representing the reality that the impetus for its creation came from Congress, and not the intelligence community.
For example, the most recent defense expenditure authorization required that the ODNI establish a “ social media data analysis center †to coordinate and track foreign social media influence operations by analyzing data voluntarily shared by US social media companies. Based upon this analysis, the ODNI would report to Congress on a quarterly basis on trends in foreign influence and disinformation operations to the public. As envisioned by Congress, the intelligence community would determine jointly with US social media companies which data and metadata will be made available for analysis.
ALSO ON RT.COM The cynical hypocrisy of the world’s No1 propagandist: US pledges $300mn to fund massive global anti-China media machineIn short, the intelligence community, using data obtained from the social media accounts of American citizens, will report to Congress how this data influences the political decision making of these same American citizens.
If this does not make the most ardent defender of the US Constitution ill, nothing will.
It is not as if the US intelligence community wasn’t trending in this direction on its own volition. The straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, was the publication in March 2021 of an intelligence community assessment entitled ‘Foreign Threats to the US 2020 Presidential Election’. In this document, the US intelligence community assessed that “ Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US .â€
But the most damning portion of this assessment came when it delved into the specific methodology employed by Russia to achieve these nefarious aims. “ Throughout the election cycle â€, the assessment declared, “ Russia’s online influence actors sought to affect US public perceptions of the candidates, as well as advance Moscow’s long standing goals of undermining confidence in US election processes and increasing sociopolitical divisions among the American people. During the presidential primaries and dating back to 2019, these actors backed candidates from both major US political parties that Moscow viewed as outsiders, while later claiming that election fraud helped what they called ‘establishment’ candidates. Throughout the election, Russia’s online influence actors sought to amplify mistrust in the electoral process by denigrating mail-in ballots, highlighting alleged irregularities, and accusing the Democratic Party of voter fraud. â€
As an American citizen who is politically engaged, I read the intelligence community assessment with a combination of interest, concern, and outrage. The notion of “ Russian online influence actors †affecting “US public perceptions of the candidates†is as intellectually vacuous as it is factually unsustainable. The stupidity encapsulated by such analysis can only be excused by the fact that the intelligence community assessment is a document produced more for the benefit of domestic political consumption than a genuine effort at identifying and quantifying legitimate threats to the US.
The assessment itself is short on hard data. However, the House Intelligence Committee has documented some 3,000 social media ads bought by Russian “troll farms†between 2015-2017, at a cost of some $100,000. These ads were in addition to so-called “organic posts,†some 80,000 of which were published on US social media, free of charge, by alleged Russian “bots†resulting in 126 million “views†by Americans. These ads were crude, unfocused, and simply inane in terms of their content.
ALSO ON RT.COM Putin should refuse Biden’s offer of a summit: Americans will bring only political theatrics & threats, nothing will be achievedTo put the alleged Russian influence campaign into perspective, one need only reflect on the fact that during his short bid for the Democratic nomination, Michael Bloomberg spent nearly $1 billion underwriting the single most sophisticated public relations campaign, including hundreds of millions of targeted social media ads put together by the most brilliant political minds money could buy. All this money, time and effort, however, could not change the reality that, to the American public, Michael Bloomberg was an unattractive candidate â€" in the end his $1 billion bought him exactly two delegates.
The fact is, the political opinions of most American citizens are formed based upon a lifetime of exposure to issues that matter for them the most, whether it be education, right-to-life, gun control, social justice, agriculture, energy, environment, law enforcement, or any other of the multitude of sources of causation that impact the day-to-day existence of the American electorate.
Some of these beliefs are inherited, such as the working-class attachment to unions. Some are driven by current affairs, such as the growing awareness of climate change. But all are derived from the life experience of each American, and the thought that these deeply held beliefs could be bought, changed, or otherwise manipulated by social media posts published by foreign actors, malign or otherwise, is deeply insulting to me, and should be to every other American as well.
The irony is that by creating an intelligence organization whose task it is to help prevent the political Balkanization of America by analyzing the social media accounts of Americans who hold differing political beliefs than “the establishment†the newly minted Foreign Malign Influence Center ostensibly serves, the resulting process will only cause the further political division of the United States.
Some 74 million Americans voted for a candidate, Donald Trump, who has promulgated the very issues that the Democratic-controlled Congress seeks to denigrate and suppress through the work of this new intelligence center. These ideas will not simply disappear because the Democrats in Congress have empowered a “center†within the intelligence community whose sole function is to demonize any political thought that does not conform with the powers that be.
As it is currently focused, the Foreign Malign Influence Center is the living, breathing embodiment of politicized intelligence, two words which, when put together, represent the death knell for any intelligence organization. Worse, the work it will be doing, when turned over to a Democratically controlled Congress desperate to undermine the political viability of those 74 million American citizens, will only further fracture an already divided nation.
ALSO ON RT.COM New York Times ‘bounties’ non-story shows US/UK media has got so used to blaming Russia, it's basically now doing it out of habitThe Foreign Malign Influence Center was specifically mandated to examine the social media influence campaigns operated by Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. It is particularly telling that they were not directed to investigate the two largest foreign sources of political influence in America today, namely the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee and the Murdoch media empire. President Putin could only dream about being able to buy congressional seats the way AIPAC does, or control what information becomes magnified (and, by extension, suppressed) by the newspapers, television and radio enterprises owned by Rupert Murdoch.
These are the true villains when it comes to foreign corruption of American politics. These foreigners, however, have a seat at the establishment table. Their malign influence will never be labeled as such, and they will never have to withstand the ignominy of having their work scrutinized under the politicized microscope of an intelligence community that has allowed itself to be corrupted by domestic American politics to the point that it no longer serves the American people as a whole, but only a select class of American persons.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Congozebilu 4 hours ago 4 hours ago
Foreign Malign Influence Center sounds like something out of a cartoon.AwareAussie2 Congozebilu 4 hours ago 4 hours agoThe catch words "freedom", "democracy" and "terrorism" don't work any more, they need to now use different phrases to con us.
John Titor 4 hours ago 4 hours agoThe Foreign Malign Influence Center is just the latest in the Democrat Government Propaganda machine.frankfalseflag 4 hours ago 4 hours agoDoes Scott Ritter actually expect Americans to wake up to the fact that they are getting more lies and propaganda than the Germans got from their Reich Chancellery in the 30s and 40s?
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May 03, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Stonebird , Apr 28 2021 18:38 utc | 18
These folks have had it with the constant stream of baseless propaganda U.S. intelligence is spilling over the world:
Dear Director of National Intelligence,we, the the 4-star Generals leading U.S. regional commands all over the world, are increasingly concerned with about the lack of evidence for claims you make about our opponents.
We, as true believers, do not doubt whatever judgment you make about the harmful activities of Russia, Iran and China. However - our allies and partners do not yet subscribe to the bliss of ignorance. They keep asking us for facts that support those judgments
Unfortunately, we have none that we could provide.
You say that Russia thought to manipulate Trump allies and to smear Biden , that Russia and Iran aimed to sway the 2020 election through covert campaigns and that China runs covert operations to influence members of Congress .
Media reports have appeared in which 'intelligence sources' claim that Russia, China and Iran are all paying bounties to the Taliban for killing U.S. soldiers. Fortunately no soldier got hurt by those rumors.
Our allies and partners read those and other reports and ask us for evidence. They want to know how exactly Russia, Iran and China are doing these things.
They, of course, hope to learn from our experience to protect their own countries.
Currently we are not able to provide them with such information. Your people keep telling our that all of it is SECRET.
We therefore ask you to declassify the facts that support your judgments. *
Sincerely
The Generals
----
PS: * Either that or shut the fuck up.Look, The generals and the intelligence agencies haven't won a war for a long time. So now they will fight each other . At least ONE of them will win this time ! Success.
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Apr 27, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Gerald Smith , Apr 27 2021 9:00 utc | 7The NYT is simply a propaganda organ of the corporate oligarchy. Whenever the US does something bad, it is always "alleged". When opponents of US hegemony are accused of doing something bad, it is never "alleged" - for example, you won't read about the "alleged Douma chemical attack" in the NYT.
Just a small point about English grammar: "alleged burglar", "alleged miracle" and "alleged conspiracy" are all correct, because "alleged" is being used here as an adjective. "Alleged antique vase", on the other hand, is incorrect because what is being alleged is not that the object is a vase; what is being alleged is that the vase is antique. Because it is being used to describe an adjective (antique), it is being used adverbially: therefore the correct usage is "allegedly antique vase".
This reminds me of John Michael Greer's formulation: the "allegedly smart phone". I use it all the time, to imply that intensive users of mobile devices may not be quite as intelligent as is generally believed. Note that what is being is alleged is not that it's a phone, but that it's smart!
Otter , Apr 27 2021 12:10 utc | 20
NYT does use "alleged" correctly. In the land of truth, one need merely state one's statement. In the land of lies, one must insert "alleged", so that others know the statement is truth.
There was a Soviet aphorism to this effect.
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Apr 16, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Caitlin Johnstone,
Back in the good old days, when things were more innocent and simple, the psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency had to covertly infiltrate the news media to manipulate the information Americans were consuming about their nation and the world. Nowadays, there is no meaningful separation between the news media and the CIA at all.
Analysis: US blinks first on Russia-Ukraine tensionsJournalist Glenn Greenwald just highlighted an interesting point about the reporting by The New York Times on the so-called “Bountygate†story the outlet broke in June of last year about the Russian government trying to pay Taliban-linked fighters to attack US soldiers in Afghanistan.
“One of the NYT reporters who originally broke the Russia bounty story (originally attributed to unnamed ‘intelligence officials’) say today that it was a CIA claim,†Greenwald tweeted .
“So media outlets - again - repeated CIA stories with no questioning: congrats to all.â€
Indeed, NYT’s original story made no mention of CIA involvement in the narrative, citing only “officials,†yet this latest article speaks as though it had been informing its readers of the story’s roots in the lying, torturing , drug-running , warmongering Central Intelligence Agency from the very beginning. The author even writes “The New York Times first reported last summer the existence of the C.I.A.’s assessment,†with the hyperlink leading to the initial article which made no mention of the CIA. It wasn’t until later that The New York Times began reporting that the CIA was looking into the Russian bounties allegations at all.
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1382793565714153472&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fcia-used-infiltrate-media-now-cia-media&sessionId=77ef0dadbd05c9f3bcb1de7857a624713a43f3d8&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ff2e7cf%3A1618526400629&width=550px
This would be the same “Russian bounties†narrative which was discredited all the way back in September when the top US military official in Afghanistan said no satisfactory evidence had surfaced for the allegations, which was further discredited today with a new article by The Daily Beast titled “ U.S. Intel Walks Back Claim Russians Put Bounties on American Troops â€.
The Daily Beast , which has itself uncritically published many articles promoting the CIA “Bountygate†narrative, reports the following:
It was a blockbuster story about Russia’s return to the imperial “Great Game†in Afghanistan. The Kremlin had spread money around the longtime central Asian battlefield for militants to kill remaining U.S. forces. It sparked a massive outcry from Democrats and their #resistance amplifiers about the treasonous Russian puppet in the White House whose admiration for Vladimir Putin had endangered American troops.
But on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had “low to moderate†confidence in the story after all. Translated from the jargon of spyworld, that means the intelligence agencies have found the story is, at best, unproven â€" and possibly untrue.
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1382769897420296194&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fcia-used-infiltrate-media-now-cia-media&sessionId=77ef0dadbd05c9f3bcb1de7857a624713a43f3d8&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ff2e7cf%3A1618526400629&width=550px
So the mass media aggressively promoted a CIA narrative that none of them ever saw proof of, because there was no proof, because it was an entirely unfounded claim from the very beginning. They quite literally ran a CIA press release and disguised it as a news story.
This allowed the CIA to throw shade and inertia on Trump’s proposed troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Germany, and to continue ramping up anti-Russia sentiments on the world stage , and may well have contributed to the fact that the agency will officially be among those who are exempt from Biden’s performative Afghanistan “withdrawal†.
In totalitarian dictatorships, the government spy agency tells the news media what stories to run, and the news media unquestioningly publish it. In free democracies, the government spy agency says “Hoo buddy, have I got a scoop for you!†and the news media unquestioningly publish it.
In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “ The CIA and the Media †reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird . It was a major scandal, and rightly so. The news media is meant to report truthfully about what happens in the world, not manipulate public perception to suit the agendas of spooks and warmongers.
Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and people are too propagandized to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like The New York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo which is then spun as fact by cable news pundits . The sole owner of The Washington Post is a CIA contractor , and WaPo has never once disclosed this conflict of interest when reporting on US intelligence agencies per standard journalistic protocol. Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona, as are known CIA assets like NBC’s Ken Dilanian, as are CIA interns like Anderson Cooper and CIA applicants like Tucker Carlson.
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-2&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1382777804014641152&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fcia-used-infiltrate-media-now-cia-media&sessionId=77ef0dadbd05c9f3bcb1de7857a624713a43f3d8&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ff2e7cf%3A1618526400629&width=550px
This isn’t Operation Mockingbird. It’s so much worse. Operation Mockingbird was the CIA doing something to the media. What we are seeing now is the CIA openly acting as the media. Any separation between the CIA and the news media, indeed even any pretence of separation, has been dropped.
This is bad. This is very, very bad. Democracy has no meaningful existence if people’s votes aren’t being cast with a clear understanding of what’s happening in their nation and their world, and if their understanding is being shaped to suit the agendas of the very government they’re meant to be influencing with their votes, what you have is the most powerful military and economic force in the history of civilization with no accountability to the electorate whatsoever. It’s just an immense globe-spanning power structure, doing whatever it wants to whoever it wants. A totalitarian dictatorship in disguise.
And the CIA is the very worst institution that could possibly be spearheading the movements of that dictatorship. A little research into the many, many horrific things the CIA has done over the years will quickly show you that this is true; hell, just a glance at what the CIA was up to with the Phoenix Program in Vietnam will.
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-3&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1382856410443186179&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fcia-used-infiltrate-media-now-cia-media&sessionId=77ef0dadbd05c9f3bcb1de7857a624713a43f3d8&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ff2e7cf%3A1618526400629&width=550px
There’s a common delusion in our society that depraved government agencies who are known to have done evil things in the past have simply stopped doing evil things for some reason. This belief is backed by zero evidence, and is contradicted by mountains of evidence to the contrary. It’s believed because it is comfortable, and for literally no other reason.
The CIA should not exist at all, let alone control the news media, much less the movements of the US empire. May we one day know a humanity that is entirely free from the rule of psychopaths, from our total planetary behavior as a collective, all the way down to the thoughts we think in our own heads.
May we extract their horrible fingers from every aspect of our being.
* * *
New book: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix .
The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi , Patreon or Paypal . If you want to read more you can buy my books . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here . Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
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May 03, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
These folks have had it with the constant stream of baseless propaganda U.S. intelligence is spilling over the world:
Dear Director of National Intelligence,we, the the 4-star Generals leading U.S. regional commands all over the world, are increasingly concerned with about the lack of evidence for claims you make about our opponents.
We, as true believers, do not doubt whatever judgment you make about the harmful activities of Russia, Iran and China. However - our allies and partners do not yet subscribe to the bliss of ignorance. They keep asking us for facts that support those judgments
Unfortunately, we have none that we could provide.
You say that Russia thought to manipulate Trump allies and to smear Biden , that Russia and Iran aimed to sway the 2020 election through covert campaigns and that China runs covert operations to influence members of Congress .
Media reports have appeared in which 'intelligence sources' claim that Russia, China and Iran are all paying bounties to the Taliban for killing U.S. soldiers. Fortunately no soldier got hurt by those rumors.
Our allies and partners read those and other reports and ask us for evidence. They want to know how exactly Russia, Iran and China are doing these things.
They, of course, hope to learn from our experience to protect their own countries.
Currently we are not able to provide them with such information. Your people keep telling our that all of it is SECRET.
We therefore ask you to declassify the facts that support your judgments. *
Sincerely
The Generals
----
PS: * Either that or shut the fuck up.The above may well have been a draft for the letter behind this report :
America’s top spies say they are looking for ways to declassify and release more intelligence about adversaries’ bad behavior, after a group of four-star military commanders sent a rare and urgent plea asking for help in the information war against Russia and China.The internal memo from nine regional military commanders last year, which was reviewed by POLITICO and not made public, implored spy agencies to provide more evidence to combat "pernicious conduct."
Only by "waging the truth in the public domain against America’s 21st century challengers†can Washington shore up support from American allies, they said. But efforts to compete in the battle of ideas, they added, are hamstrung by overly stringent secrecy practices.
“We request this help to better enable the US, and by extension its allies and partners, to win without fighting, to fight now in so-called gray zones, and to supply ammunition in the ongoing war of narratives," the commanders who oversee U.S. military forces in Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America, as well as special operations troops, wrote to then-acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire last January.
“Unfortunately, we continue to miss opportunities to clarify truth, counter distortions, puncture false narratives, and influence events in time to make a difference," they added.
The generals must have been seriously miffed to write such a letter. There have been a number of published intelligence judgments where the NSA had expressed low confidence in conclusions made mainly by the CIA. The NSA is part of the military.
Between two bureaucracies such an accusing letter or internal memo is the equivalent of a declaration of war. It is doubtful that the intelligence folks would win that fight.
That gives some hope that the Office of the DNI and the agencies below it will now lessen their production of nonsensical claims.
Posted by b on April 28, 2021 at 15:49 UTC | Permalink
Josh , Apr 28 2021 16:02 utc | 1
Right on man.Kartoschka , Apr 28 2021 16:04 utc | 2
Thank You.I hope you're right.psychohistorian , Apr 28 2021 16:12 utc | 3
It could go the other way.
They will produce more "evidence"Thanks for that b....is it rubber meets the road time?Caliman , Apr 28 2021 16:25 utc | 4I just read that the US is getting all its ambassadorial folk out of Afghanistan....maybe somebody is believing May 1 is a firmer deadline than the Biden 9/11 myth.
The shit show is about to crash, IMO, but if it is in slow motion, this crazy could go on for a while....what geo-political straw will break the camel's back?
Lewis Black, a pretty good US comedian, used to have a bit in the mid-2000's where he would ask the W administration flacks why they didn't just make up evidence about the Iraq WMDs after they "found out" that there were no weapons in the country. Black would tell them just make it up; we're used to it. Just give us an excuse to believe in the BS for God's sake; we'll do it!Serg , Apr 28 2021 16:29 utc | 5I feel it's the same with our satrap nations around the world. At this time, is there anyone who does not understand that US foreign policy is conducted for and by MICIMATT (look it up)? So the generals have got nothing to worry about: keep pounding out that BS; there's a willing, able, and ready corps of salesmen and women in the media who will make enough of the public believe it for "democracy's" purposes.
General Mackenzie who testified before the US House Armed Services Committee said Iran’s widespread use of drones means that the US is operating without complete air superiority for the first time since the Korean War.librul , Apr 28 2021 16:30 utc | 6Iran has time and again stated that its military capabilities are merely defensive and are designed to deter foreign threats.
General Flynn had been head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (military).gottlieb , Apr 28 2021 16:36 utc | 7
The CIA was out to get him. It took a while but they eventually hamstrung him good."Dear Generals, who haven't won a war in 75 years, so much for the DIA huh? We'd love to share our intelligence with you, our evidence showing the overwhelming and egregious misdeeds of our hateful, spiteful disgusting enemies, whose questioning of our Word should be met with charges of treason, but to give you evidence on top of our own unquestionable and 100% correct threat estimations, would compromise our Intelligence Gathering Methods which are of the strictest security and would threaten the ongoing ability of this Agency to gather and disseminate the unquestionable facts that without fear of contradiction we know is the truth. In short, dear Generals - work on winning a war, any war, and don't meddle in places that befuddle your ability to follow orders. Hooah! The CIA."librul , Apr 28 2021 16:51 utc | 8This fight has been ongoing for years.Canadian Cents , Apr 28 2021 17:10 utc | 11
Bottom line: The CIA wants to control the messages and narrative.Article from 2013, great lead photo. Robert Mueller, James Clapper, John Brennan
and General Flynn all seated near each other.https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2013/07/intel-wars-dia-cia-and-flynns-battle-consolidate-spying/66716/
Headline and subtext:Intel Wars: DIA, CIA and Flynn’s Battle to Consolidate Spying
The Defense Department wants in on the spying game. But will the CIA block their efforts?
The CIA essentially absorbed the Pentagon’s only military-wide spying agency seven years ago [2006]
when the Defense HUMINT Service was dismantled -- and now, the Pentagon wants it back.The CIA is quietly pushing the Armed Services committees along, hoping that Flynn’s DCS will be remembered by history as a failed power grab.
rgl , Apr 28 2021 17:31 utc | 13The CIA/FBI/17+ known/unknown agencies are clearly a security apparatus that's gone out of control when even the USA's "nine regional [four-star general] military commanders" are out of the loop and pleading to be better informed. Worryingly, though, they ask for "ammunition in the ongoing war of narratives," which they apparently are ready to go right along with.
Western news media, of course, has become but a compliant weaponized appendage of that security apparatus, and democracy, which depends on informed voters, is nowhere in control of any of this.
Down this slippery slope, lies fascism.
librul , Apr 28 2021 17:48 utc | 15I do not see how this is possible. Every major event, from Vietnam, to JFK, to 9-11, and a myriad of others, had US lies baked into the cake. If the US ceased to lie, it would cease to function as America functions today. It would be incapable of empire.
The US establishment, from the President on down, is based on lies. They cannot survive on truth.
No. Nothing is going to change in this regard.
m , Apr 28 2021 18:13 utc | 17b ended his post with: " lessen their production of nonsensical claims."
"Nonsensical" misses the mark. They are *agenda-driven* claims.
I don't believe the Generals care one whit whether the spineless jellyfish pols
in other countries see through our lies. The Generals want the Pentagon to
have more participation in shaping the agenda and it's attendant narrative.Erelis , Apr 28 2021 20:31 utc | 26The military used to be that part pf the US government apparatus ("deep state") that emphasized the value and importance of allies the most.
IMHO what is happening here is that the generals sense the imcreasing cracks in the US-centered alliance system. They attribute it to the work of the intelligence community, which is certainly a contributing factor, but thr real cause is the relative decline in US power and general unreliability due to political instability. The USA is less and less attractive as a partner. When the generals ask another country for a favour as they had been used to for decades they increasingly often get just questions and excuses in return.
K_C_ , Apr 28 2021 22:26 utc | 28Is this a sign of a struggle between the CIA and Pentagon as to who is the boss of foreign and war policy? Anybody remember when CIA supported jihadists were fighting Pentagon supported groups (were they jihadists?) in Syria. Seems like the Pentagon is the one deciding on relations with the Syrian Kurds, and not the CIA. Flynn was actively helping the Damascus with info about the CIA backed jihadists.
I would rather have the Pentagon win as they are not all that hot-to-trot for actual wars. The CIA should just go back to running US media, law makers, corporation and ruining civil liberties.
Isn't it safe to assume that *anything* the CIA says publicly, either through direct channels or their co-opted corporate media, is false? Cue the Mike Pimpeo quote: "We lied, we cheated, we stole..." and of course the entire history of that useless agency, lol.
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Apr 27, 2021 | tass.com
I will allow myself to quote from b’s link:
Czech counterintelligence finds no proof of Russians’ presence in Vrbetice - president (TASS, April 25, 2021)
PRAGUE, April 25. /TASS/. The evidence that some "Russian agents" were present at the ammo depot in the village of Vrbetice was not mentioned in the reports of the Czech Republic’s Security Information Service, Czech President Milos Zeman said in his emergency televised address in connection with the 2014 incident on Sunday."I can state that the report of the Security Information Service says and I underline this - that there is neither proof nor evidence [of eyewitnesses] that these two agents [the Russians who were accused of involvement in the incident - TASS] were at the [ammo depot] in Vrbetice. When the premises of the second depot were examined right before the explosion there, no explosive device was found there," Zeman said in his address broadcast by Prima and CNN Prima News TV channels.
The president stressed that the suspicion about the alleged role of two foreign agents in the 2014 ammo depot explosions in Vrbetice came to the surface over the past weeks. "The Security Information Service had never before mentioned the incident in Vrbetice over the past six years," he noted.
…In the Russian-language version of the same story Zeman also talks about the possibility that the explosives were not properly handled:
Zeman: counterintelligence has no evidence of the involvement of "agents of the Russian Federation" in the explosions in Vrbetica (TASS, April 25, 2021 â€" machine translated from Russian)
…
Zeman also said that careless handling of ammunition is being considered as the cause of the explosions and the possible involvement of foreign intelligence services is being considered. "We are working with two versions - that the explosions [in Vrbetica] occurred as a result of careless handling of ammunition, and the second version - that agents of foreign special services are to blame for this," Zeman said.
…Zeman also provided an indirect hint as to who might have coordinated the scandal on the Czech side and on whose orders:
Czech President questioned the effectiveness of the CIA (TASS, April 25, 2021 â€" machine translated from Russian, emphasis mine)
PRAGUE, April 25. / TASS /. Czech President Milos Zeman questioned the effectiveness of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in connection with incorrect information, on the basis of which the United States made an erroneous decision on a military operation against Iraq."The CIA is the intelligence agency that informed the US government that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And this [CIA allegation] was not only not confirmed, but was [completely] refuted," Zeman said Sunday in an interview with Prima and CNN. Prima NEWS . - The consequences [of this step by the CIA] were terrible - thousands of lives, enormous material damage, and so on. Is this how a high-quality intelligence service works? "
The head of state made such a statement, answering the question whether he intends to confer the rank of general on the head of the Security and Information Service - counterintelligence of the Czech Republic - Michal Koudelka, who was recently awarded the CIA medal in the United States . Zeman said that he would consider the possibility of his promotion next year and only if the version of the Czech special services about the involvement of foreign agents in the explosions at the ammunition depot in the village of Vrbetice in 2014 is confirmed.
Earlier Zakharova noted that the local authorities didn’t even know who operated the ammo depot:
Zakharova commented on the investigation of the explosions in Vrbetica (RT, April 20, 2021 â€" machine translated from Russian)
…
“Seven years have passed. Did the trial take place? There was no court. Two people died ... Here is the answer to your question, including - who is the beneficiary of all this marasmic parade. There was an investigation, there was an investigation - nothing came of it, " RIA Novosti quotes Zakharova.
…
She said that "the local authorities did not know that since 2006 the ammunition depot has not been used by the army, and the Ministry of Defense is renting out the warehouse premises to private arms companies."Zakharova added that "the huge amount of weapons that were in the warehouses for eight years were without any control from the authorities."
…Posted by: S | Apr 25 2021 13:05 utc | 4
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Apr 27, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Biswapriya Purkayast , Apr 25 2021 14:20 utc | 10
These days evidence no longer has to be presented for a claim because the accusation is a loyalty test for the Amerikastani Empire and vassal citizens. The more outlandish the claim the more they have to rush to prove their loyalty so outlandish evidence free claims are far from as insane as they seem to be. They have a very definite purpose.
I do not want to talk about Covid though I'm Indian and my former teacher died today of it. I am convinced that discussions about it inevitably work to split the anti Imperialist resistance.
jared , Apr 25 2021 14:48 utc | 13
@ Posted by: Biswapriya Purkayast | Apr 25 2021 14:20 utc | 10
"I am convinced that discussions about it inevitably work to split the anti Imperialist resistance."
That is an interesting take - world view.
My view is that:
The world is essentially run by and for and as it pleases wealthy and influential persons and organizations. They can do this because they have money and power and are thereby able to control access to money and power. These persons and organizations are the owners and the effect of their influence where it is somewhat constructive is neoliberalism and where it is less constructive is destabilization (surely there is a better term).
Beneath them are the operatives which serve them and thereby climb the ladder of wealth and influence. These are the politicians and beauracrats and media and the military. The beauracrats are particularly problematic because they are unelected, unaccountable, operate unmonitored and collaborate.
In this system, the only means for yourselves and family to survive is to serve the owners - via the structures created to enrich the beauracrats.
Please describe your view.
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Apr 27, 2021 | www.strategic-culture.org
When truth is marginalized, the fringe is the only place where it’s to be found.
So it looks like Russia didn’t pay the Taliban to kill U.S. soldiers after all.
Last summer, the New York Times announced in a front-page story that “American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants killing coalition forces in Afghanistan â€" including targeting American troops.â€
The article rang with certainty. “Some officials have theorized that the Russians may be seeking revenge on NATO forces for a 2018 battle in Syria in which the American military killed several hundred pro-Syrian forces, including numerous Russian mercenaries,†it said. The operation, it went on, appears to be “the handiwork of Unit 29155, an arm of Russia’s military intelligence agency, known widely as the GRU. … Western intelligence officials say the unit, which has operated for more than a decade, has been charged by the Kremlin with carrying out a campaign to destabilize the West through subversion, sabotage and assassination.â€
This was red meat for congressional Democrats eager to tar Trump with whatever brush was at hand. Nancy Pelosi issued a call to arms, declaring: “Congress and the country need answers now.†Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer adopted a tone of mock disbelief: “Russia gives bounties to kill Americans and the administration does nothing? Nothing? Donald Trump, you’re not being a very strong president here as usual.†Joe Biden called the report “horrifying†and said “there is no bottom to the depth of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin’s depravity if it’s true.â€
Except that it isn’t true now that we know that U.S. intelligence agencies, according to the White House, view the report with only “low to moderate confidence†â€" which, in layman’s language, either means that it could be true â€" kind of, sort of, maybe â€" or that it’s pure baloney. In any event, it’s hardly reason to accus a sitting president of “a betrayal of every single American family with a loved one serving in Afghanistan or anywhere overseas,†as Biden did the day after the story broke.
Charlie Savage, whose byline appears on a number of last summer’s pieces, offered a series of mealy-mouthed excuses for how he and his fellow Times reporters managed to get it so wrong. “Former intelligence officials … have noted that it is rare in the murky world of intelligence to have courtroom levels of proof beyond a reasonable doubt about what an adversary is covertly doing,†he said . He described the original intelligence findings as “muddied†because a key figure in the alleged plot “had fled to Russia â€" possibly while using a passport linked to a Russian spy agency.â€
So it isn’t the Times’s or the CIA’s fault, you see â€" it’s merely a hazard of the trade. But isn’t it’s curious how words like “murky†and “muddied†never cropped up last summer when the Times was busily egging Democrats on with stories charging that the bounties had led to “at least one U.S. troop death†or maybe even three ? “Father of Slain Marine Finds Heartbreak Anew in Possible Russian Bounty,†a Times headline declared. “American officials intercepted electronic data showing large financial transfers from a bank account controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency to a Taliban-linked account,†another claimed .
All of which was nonsense, as is now clear. Yet not only has the Times failed to apologize but White House spokesman Jen Psaki managed to spin the story last week so that it’s still Moscow’s fault and “there are [still] questions to be answered by the Russian government.â€
Although the corporate media dutifully echoed the Times, a few skeptics did get it right. Ray McGovern, an ex-CIA official who now heads a group calling itself Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, called the story “dubious†right off the bat. Scott Ritter, the ex-UN weapons inspector who blew the cover off charges that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was bristling with weapons of mass destruction, wrote that “there is no corroboration, nothing that would allow this raw ‘intelligence’ to be turned into a product worthy of the name.†Caitlin Johnstone, who covers U.S. politics from Australia yet still does a better job of it than most stateside reporters, denounced the entire affair as a “malignant psyop,†adding: “It really is funny how the most influential news outlets in the western world will uncritically parrot whatever they’re told to say by the most powerful and depraved intelligence agencies on the planet, and then turn around and tell you without a hint of self-awareness that Russia and China are bad because they have state media.â€
Then there’s someone named Dan Lazare who had pointed out a few obvious facts in Strategic Culture a few days after the supposed Times scoop came out:
“But the report doesn’t even make sense. Not only have the Taliban been at war with the United States since 2001, they’re winning. So why should Russia pay them to do what they’ve been happily doing on their own for close to two decades? Contrary to what the Times wants us to believe, there’s no evidence that Russia backs the Taliban or wants the U.S. to leave with its tail between its legs. Quite the opposite as a quick glance at a map will attest. Given that Afghanistan abuts the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan and is less than a thousand miles from Chechnya, where Russia fought a brutal war against Sunni Islamist separatists in 1999-2000, the last thing it wants is a Muslim fundamentalist republic in the heart of Central Asia.â€
The fact that the New York doesn’t even consider†the broad geopolitical backdrop, the article added, “makes its reporting seem all the more dubious†â€" words that are as appropriate now as they were then.
None of this matters, however, because Strategic Culture, it turns out, is “controlled by Russian intelligence†and publishes “fringe voices and conspiracy theories.†Yes, that’s what the Times says , and its source, as usual, is nothing more than unnamed U.S. government sources whispering in its ear. But if Strategic Culture is so marginal, how is it that it got the story right while the Times’s own conspiracy tales turned out to be false?
When truth is marginalized, the fringe is the only place where it’s to be found.
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Apr 27, 2021 | consortiumnews.com
The CIA Used to Infiltrate the Media April 20, 2021 Save
Now the CIA is the media. This isn’t Operation Mockingbird, writes Caitlin Johnstone. It’s much worse.
(Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.comB ack in the good old days, when things were more innocent and simple, the psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency had to covertly infiltrate the news media to manipulate the information Americans were consuming about their nation and the world. Nowadays, there is no meaningful separation between the news media and the CIA at all.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald just highlighted an interesting point about the reporting by The New York Times on the so-called Bountygate story the outlet broke in June of last year about the Russian government trying to pay Taliban-linked fighters to attack U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
“One of the NYT reporters who originally broke the Russia bounty story (originally attributed to unnamed ‘intelligence officials’) say today that it was a CIA claim,†Greenwald tweeted . “So media outlets â€" again â€" repeated CIA stories with no questioning: congrats to all.â€
Indeed, the NYT’s original story made no mention of CIA involvement in the narrative, citing only “officials,†yet this latest article speaks as though it had been informing its readers of the story’s roots in the lying, torturing , drug-running , warmongering Central Intelligence Agency from the very beginning. The author even writes “The New York Times first reported last summer the existence of the C.I.A.’s assessment,†with the hyperlink leading to the initial article which made no mention of the CIA. It wasn’t until later that The New York Times began reporting that the CIA was looking into the Russian bounties allegations at all.
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1382793565714153472&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fconsortiumnews.com%2F2021%2F04%2F20%2Fthe-cia-used-to-infiltrate-the-media%2F&sessionId=f9f124f1ca8fb3f8d08d8c9bb0916072822c047d&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ff2e7cf%3A1618526400629&width=550px
This would be the same “Russian bounties†narrative which was discredited all the way back in September when the top U.S. military official in Afghanistan said no satisfactory evidence had surfaced for the allegations, which was further discredited today with a new article by The Daily Beast titled “ U.S. Intel Walks Back Claim Russians Put Bounties on American Troops .“
The Daily Beast , which has itself uncritically published many articles promoting the CIA “Bountygate†narrative, reports the following:
“It was a blockbuster story about Russia’s return to the imperial “Great Game†in Afghanistan. The Kremlin had spread money around the longtime central Asian battlefield for militants to kill remaining U.S. forces. It sparked a massive outcry from Democrats and their #resistance amplifiers about the treasonous Russian puppet in the White House whose admiration for Vladimir Putin had endangered American troops.
But on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had “low to moderate†confidence in the story after all. Translated from the jargon of spyworld, that means the intelligence agencies have found the story is, at best, unprovenâ€"and possibly untrue.â€
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-1&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1382769897420296194&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fconsortiumnews.com%2F2021%2F04%2F20%2Fthe-cia-used-to-infiltrate-the-media%2F&sessionId=f9f124f1ca8fb3f8d08d8c9bb0916072822c047d&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ff2e7cf%3A1618526400629&width=550px
So the mass media aggressively promoted a CIA narrative that none of them ever saw proof of, because there was no proof, because it was an entirely unfounded claim from the very beginning. They quite literally ran a CIA press release and disguised it as a news story.
This allowed the CIA to throw shade and inertia on Trump’s proposed troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Germany, and to continue ramping up anti-Russia sentiments on the world stage , and may well have contributed to the fact that the agency will officially be among those who are exempt from Biden’s performative Afghanistan “withdrawal.â€
In totalitarian dictatorships, the government spy agency tells the news media what stories to run, and the news media unquestioningly publish it. In free democracies, the government spy agency says “Hoo buddy, have I got a scoop for you!†and the news media unquestioningly publish it.
In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “ The CIA and the Media †reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird . It was a major scandal, and rightly so. The news media is meant to report truthfully about what happens in the world, not manipulate public perception to suit the agendas of spooks and warmongers.
Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and people are too propagandized to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like The New York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo which is then spun as fact by cable news pundits . The sole owner of The Washington Post is a CIA contractor , and WaPo has never once disclosed this conflict of interest when reporting on U.S. intelligence agencies per standard journalistic protocol.
Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans such as John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona, as are known CIA assets like NBC’s Ken Dilanian, as are CIA interns like Anderson Cooper and CIA applicants like Tucker Carlson.
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-2&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1382777804014641152&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fconsortiumnews.com%2F2021%2F04%2F20%2Fthe-cia-used-to-infiltrate-the-media%2F&sessionId=f9f124f1ca8fb3f8d08d8c9bb0916072822c047d&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ff2e7cf%3A1618526400629&width=550px
This isn’t Operation Mockingbird. It’s so much worse. Operation Mockingbird was the CIA doing something to the media. What we are seeing now is the CIA openly acting as the media. Any separation between the CIA and the news media, indeed even any pretence of separation, has been dropped.
This is bad. This is very, very bad. Democracy has no meaningful existence if people’s votes are cast without a clear understanding of what’s happening in their nation and their world. When their understanding is being shaped to suit the agendas of the very government they’re meant to be influencing with their votes, what you have is the most powerful military and economic force in the history of civilization with no accountability to the electorate whatsoever. It’s just an immense globe-spanning power structure, doing whatever it wants to whoever it wants. A totalitarian dictatorship in disguise.
And the CIA is the very worst institution that could possibly be spearheading the movements of that dictatorship. A little research into the many, many horrific things the CIA has done over the years will quickly show you that this is true; hell, just a glance at what the CIA was up to with the Phoenix Program in Vietnam will.
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-3&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1382856410443186179&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fconsortiumnews.com%2F2021%2F04%2F20%2Fthe-cia-used-to-infiltrate-the-media%2F&sessionId=f9f124f1ca8fb3f8d08d8c9bb0916072822c047d&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ff2e7cf%3A1618526400629&width=550px
There’s a common delusion in our society that depraved government agencies who are known to have done evil things in the past have simply stopped doing evil things for some reason. This belief is backed by zero evidence, and is contradicted by mountains of evidence to the contrary. It’s believed because it is comfortable, and for literally no other reason.
The CIA should not exist at all, let alone control the news media, much less the movements of the US empire. May we one day know a humanity that is entirely free from the rule of psychopaths, from our total planetary behavior as a collective, all the way down to the thoughts we think in our own heads.
May we extract their horrible fingers from every aspect of our being.
Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium . Her work is entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook , following her antics on Twitter , checking out her podcast on either Youtube , soundcloud , Apple podcasts or Spotify , following her on Steemit , throwing some money into her tip jar on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of her sweet merchandise , buying her new book, Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix , and her other books: Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .
This article was re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Wiffle , April 22, 2021 at 17:36
Go to any platform and 98% of commentators’ “opinions†are exact duplicates of what the unholy intel/press partnership has trained them to say.
Hot Dog , April 21, 2021 at 19:00Douglas Adams, brilliant author of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, invented the Infinite Improbability Drive to cross vast intersteller distances in a mere nothingth of a second without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace. Following in his footsteps I adopted the Infinite Improbability Filter, which I use to parse every statement from governments. I recommend it. Afghans have to be paid by Russians to shoot the invaders and occupiers of their country ?? Infinitely improbable. Saddam Hussein had nuclear bombs in aluminum tubes that he could fly over US cities ?? ?? Infinitely improbable. A bunch of guys in a cave can knock down a skyscraper in Manhattan ?? Infinitely improbable. Joe Biden will put an end to war ?? ?? Infinitely improbable. The USA is spreading democracy in oil producing nations ??? Infinitely improbable. Russia won the 2016 election ??? Infinitely improbable. The CIA are the good guys ??? Infinitely improbable. Believe the corporate media ??? ??? Infinitely improbable. (hXXp://www.earthstar.co.uk/drive.htm). RIP Adams.
Rex Williams , April 21, 2021 at 18:52
“Drug-running�
Well done, Caitlin.First time I have seen any indication of that in the media and even I have known about it for a decade. Not just drug-running, but the world control of heroin. Australian soldiers filling in the role of protector of the crops in Afghanistan and also killing innocent civilians, a matter now under investigation but proven already.
Thankfully, when you list the past members of that infamous group and the controlling role they enjoy in today’s media, one should not forget the contributions made by many ex-CIA personnel seen on the pages of Consortium News and what a valuable contribution they have made to this publication. Many thanks to them.
I am sure that there will be many comments on this subject today.
rosemerry , April 21, 2021 at 15:22
Using the word “intelligence†for the nonsense that the USA collects and tries to get us to believe is pathetic!! Use your brains, US people and do not assume that because YOUR leaders want to attack and destroy designated enemies all over the globe,that other people are just like you. You are NOT in existential danger from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea- YOU are the ones doing the threatening, the attacking, the lying, the sanctions, the offensive descriptions of leaders with no attempt to be diplomatic and certainly no effort to understand the points of view of anyone outside your little circle of “élite†elected or appointed or bought rich men and women living in the Cold War years and educated into violent hatred of anyone different.
robert e williamson jr , April 22, 2021 at 12:54Hot Dog, I could not agree more, but Hot Damn there is more so much more. Is it possible that the revelations in this book I discuss might free Julian? The book proves miss use of secrecy classifications that were used to cover up an act of executive action with extreme prejudice
The pivotal events that allow the re-opening of the JFK murder case are exposed in Josiah Thompson’s “LAST SECOND IN DALLASâ€.
Like I have stated already please don’t take my word for this. Read the book thanks to the Zapruder film and the recordings taken that day of police radios being still of a quality to allow top notch analysis of them, irrefutable evidence has been verified. The story of facts have changed the nature of what we now know to be true. Facts that are provided with their mathematical proof.
If you believe in science, especially science as pursued in this investigation by individuals of exculpatory character and honesty you will learn the latest scientific interpretations of the evidence analysis.
Something that, as it turn out cannot be said about the Ramsey Panel.
Thompson’s investigation has neutered the Warren Commission and other various government attempts, see the House Select Committee effort and the Ramsey Panel’s efforts to cover up the truth.
This results in exposing the lies the CIA committed to trying to cover up their involvement. Lies ironically exposed by individuals investigating the murder, lies discovered in part by the release of JFK documents in 2017. Why did CIA lie from day one, Nov. 22,1963?
DECLASSIFY, DECLASSIFY, DECLASSIFY, Jimm you got it, and the curtain has been pulled back slightly if not more by this investigation.
Time for all to pressure CIA for the truth.
Thanks CN
PEACE
Anonymot , April 21, 2021 at 10:11Yes, excellent about the media, but there’s a far greater importance than that; the CIA IS, yes IS the American government. Certainly, it manages the public through its controlling influence on the MSM, but its controlling interest in foreign affairs has been followed by its creeping increasingly into the domestic field, also. It has been fighting for supremacy over both the State Department and the FBI for years and won the former hands down via the Bush and Obama years. Hillary at the State Department was the CIA’s dream! The devastation that followed, from the burning of everything from Libya to the Ukraine was their wildest wishes come true.
Trump ran on the idea that the intelligence agencies were too invasive and he battled with them from the beginning, but the CIA knows where everyone’s skeletons are hidden and Trump has a pile of them. What the CIA then did was point out to him that he had little room to squiggle or they would put him in jeopardy. As a sop, they allowed him to spend four years not hating Russia and instead, hating China, climate change, the EU, etc. while he allowed them to dictate what the CIA wanted done domestically, pipelines, the border, etc. That made them tower over the FBI.
Now that the CIA helped dump Trump with their media control, they are back in the saddle with Biden, Russia, the CIA’s favorite target for WW III, is back on the front burner with its usual hocus pocus stories about the Ukraine, Iran is heating up and so is China.
But America is now the mosquito attacking the elephant and the CIA with all of its ignorance and incompetence is back, leading the dance with their partners in the military and the military industrial complex.It will be great fun to go out with a bang.
Philip Reed , April 21, 2021 at 10:08
Whatever happened to Carl Bernstein? Where is that guy from Watergate and Mockingbird? Now turned into a CNN shill.
Sad. Thanks Caitlin for reiterating what most of us know but always needs your persistent clarification.
Just a short beef with your article. Why did you feel it necessary to include Tucker in your list of CIA connected media personalities? Especially based on a link to an article that was an obvious hit piece on Tucker. Tucker has morphed into one of the only MSM personalities who attacks hypocrisy on both sides of the aisle. He reports on subjects that none of the other corporate media outlets won’t touch out of pure political felty to the Democratic Party. He used to take sides years ago. No longer the case. He often has Glenn Greenwald on in recent times and they are obviously simpatico with each other. Give Tucker a break Caitlin. He’s the only one on MS corporate media who dares to deviate from the “ chosen narrative “.Stevie Boy , April 21, 2021 at 08:02
Unfortunately, this is also true of all the members of the ‘Five Eyes’ sewer.
In the UK, MI6, MI5, GCHQ and the other related institutions infest the MSM. The BBC and the Guardian being two obvious direct mouthpieces for the security services. And, the CIA run their operations directly out of RAF bases (Eg. Anne Sacoolas and her husband).
During the World Wars, the security services maybe had a legitimate role in fighting obvious enemies. However, now we are the enemy !
Can this sewer ever be drained ?
Donald Duck , April 21, 2021 at 06:19A slow-burning coup has been emerging in the West since the 1990s.; it is now reaching its full fruition. Political parties, the MSM, the military and spook organisations, state and corporate bureaucracies, a trillionaire class, film and entertainment industries have congealed into a massive technocratic centrist blob. Orthodox politics and ideology is now a thing of the past. These now are the controlling force behind a quasi-religious narrative that now seems unassailable. Where this is taking us in anybody’s guess. Maybe into the eugenicist Brave New World or of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel ‘We’ first published in 1924.
Well we’d better wake up soon, or we are not going to wake up at all.
John Hagan , April 21, 2021 at 03:32
Tumour: A ‘body’ can be 99 percent healthy yet one cancerous cell can cause much damage growing into a tumour. Although it realizes that by destroying the very body it feeds on it is also destroying itself yet that end does not prevent its greed for reproduction. Most US citizens are well aware where the tumour lies and its progress.
For those who have the interest I made a short video illustrating the thesis above regarding the possibility that US is suffering a malignant tumour in three areas.The three areas are the war machine, wall street, education. It can be found on YouTube. John Hagan.Dave , April 20, 2021 at 21:17
Ms Johnstone is spot on, as usual. The CIA â€" aka the Christian Investment Authority â€" is no longer needed. Of course, it never was needed, given that the USA taxpayer funds more than fifteen other “intelligence†agencies, including State Dept. intelligence, the FBI, the various military intelligence groups, etc. The CIA was from its beginning an extra-legal, law-breaking, and often illegal operative group representing the filth, the sleaze of America’s corporate and banking empires. If the CIA is defunded, don’t worry about its work force. They will re-emerge in the media, the think-tanks, the corporate bureaucracies, the military-industrial complex, and foreign government sinecures. Anyway, good riddance to bad rubbish…at least an honest and responsible American can hope the CIA is disbanded as soon as possible.
S.P. Korolev , April 22, 2021 at 04:17
Haven’t heard that acronym before, excellent! My favourite is ‘Capitalism’s Invisible Army’…
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Apr 25, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
hooligan2009 11 hours ago
looks so real 10 hours ago (Edited)cui bono?
exactly what does the US gain by constantly smacking down russia? better jobs, higher education, better health maybe? less debt/smaller deficits for US citizens?
why is it in the interest of the US to have open southern borders with tens of millions of the poor, sick and stupid seeking to join the free **** army of entitled karens - and yet - antagonize, vilify and belittle fellow white christians of russia?
the US is being invaded as we speak, its tax dollars are being siphoned off to pay for the poor, sick and stupid flooding in.
it is not russia that is doing the invading.
it is economic migrants answering the siren call of the GOON squad and a criminal cabal that is building a political base that cannot be defeated.
it is not russia that is bankrupting the US by forcing it to blow out spending beyond its tax base to defend its citizens.
it is socialist policies like the "green new deal" and the response to a (yet to be isolated) virus that are bankrupting the nation.
the enemy of the US is within and is ripping the country apart.
the enemy is socialism and the pursuit of the lowest common economic and educational denominator by mentally challenged morons like the illlegal POTUS (POXONUS) and his illegal immigrant VPOTUS (VPOXONUS).
jusstpassinthru 9 hours ago (Edited)Colonize Russia and China the elites get off Scott free from persecution of international crimes committed by them. Their rise is terrifying to the elites soon if not stopped will impose international law on them, like going after the NazI's after WW2. They must feel the noose tightening judging by the paranoid attacks. That said recent moves by the west looks like they are ahead they are attacking on all fronts.
Once again, it seems we're mistaking a corporation for a country. The United States government and America are two totally different things. At present the US corporate government is operating totally as a criminal organization.
cui bono? The corporation.
9 Corpus Juris Secundum, § 883
"The United States government is a foreign corporation with respect to a state." 19C.J.S. Corporations § 883 citing In re Merriam's Estate, 36 N.Y. 505, 141 N.Y. 479(1894), and affirmed in United States v. Perkins, 163 U.S. 625, 41 L.Ed. 287 (1896).
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Apr 25, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Putin remarked how to "attack Russia" has become "a sport, a new sport, who makes the loudest statements." And then he went full Kipling: "Russia is attacked here and there for no reason. And of course, all sorts of petty Tabaquis [jackals] are running around like Tabaqui ran around Shere Khan [the tiger] – everything is like in Kipling's book – howling along and ready to serve their sovereign. Kipling was a great writer".
The – layered – metaphor is even more startling as it echoes the late 19th century geopolitical Great Game between the British and Russian empires, of which Kipling was a protagonist.
Once again Putin had to stress that "we really don't want to burn any bridges. But if someone perceives our good intentions as indifference or weakness and intends to burn those bridges completely or even blow them up, he should know that Russia's response will be asymmetric, swift and harsh".
"Tensions skirting wartime levels"Now compare all of the above with the White House Executive Order (EO) declaring a "national emergency" to "deal with the Russian threat".
This is directly connected to President Biden – actually the combo telling him what to do, complete with earpiece and teleprompter – promising Ukraine's President Zelensky that Washington would "take measures" to support Kiev's wishful thinking of retaking Donbass and Crimea.
There are several eyebrow-raising issues with this EO. It denies, de facto, to any Russian national the full rights to their US property. Any US resident may be accused of being a Russian agent engaged in undermining US security. A sub-sub paragraph (C), detailing "actions or policies that undermine democratic processes or institutions in the United States or abroad", is vague enough to be used to eliminate any journalism that supports Russia's positions in international affairs.
Purchases of Russian OFZ bonds have been sanctioned, as well as one of the companies involved in the production of the Sputnik V vaccine. Yet the icing on this sanction cake may well be that from now on all Russian citizens, including dual citizens, may be barred from entering US territory except via a rare special authorization on top of the ordinary visa.
The Russian paper Vedomosti has noted that in such paranoid atmosphere the risks for large companies such as Yandex or Kaspersky Lab are significantly increasing. Still, these sanctions have not been met with surprise in Moscow. The worst is yet to come, according to Beltway insiders: two packages of sanctions against Nord Stream 2 already approved by the US Department of Justice.
The crucial point is that this EO de facto places anyone reporting on Russia's political positions as potentially threatening "American democracy". As top political analyst Alastair Crooke has remarked, this is a "procedure usually reserved for citizens of enemy states during times of war". Crooke adds, "US hawks are upping the ante fiercely against Moscow. Tensions and rhetoric are skirting wartime levels."
It's an open question whether Putin's State of the Nation will be seriously examined by the toxic lunatic combo of neocons and humanitarian imperialists bent on simultaneously harassing Russia and China.
But the fact is something extraordinary has already started to happen: a "de-escalation" of sorts.
Even before Putin's address, Kiev, NATO and the Pentagon apparently got the message implicit in Russia moving two armies, massive artillery batteries and airborne divisions to the borders of Donbass and to Crimea – not to mention top naval assets moved from the Caspian to the Black Sea. NATO could not even dream of matching that.
Facts on different grounds speak volumes. Both Paris and Berlin were terrified of a possible Kiev clash directly against Russia, and lobbied furiously against it, bypassing the EU and NATO.
Then someone – it might have been Jake Sullivan – must have whispered on Crash Test Dummy's earpiece that you don't go around insulting the head of a nuclear state and expect to keep your global "credibility". So after that by now famous "Biden" phone call to Putin came the invitation to the climate change summit, in which any lofty promises are largely rhetorical, as the Pentagon will continue to be the largest polluting entity on planet Earth.
... ... ...
Whatever happens next, for all practical purposes Iron Curtain 2.0 is now on, and it simply won't go away. There will be more sanctions. Everything was thrown at the Bear short of a hot war. It will be immensely entertaining to watch how, and via which steps, Washington will engage on a "de-escalation and diplomatic process" with Russia.
The Hegemon may always find a way to deploy a massive P.R. campaign and ultimately claim a diplomatic success in "dissolving" the impasse. Well, that certainly beats a hot war. Otherwise, lowly Jungle Book adventurers have been advised: try anything funny and be ready to meet "asymmetric, swift and harsh".
Lordflin 10 hours ago
zoghead 16 hours agoVery true...
Also true... Kipling was a great writer... loved him as a kid... Still remember Rikki Tikki Tavi... who couldn't...
War is coming... and Putin will get dragged to the party kicking and screaming... but he has no choice but to show up...
wootendw PREMIUM 16 hours agoAmazing how calm and composed Putin is when he talks of the West. I admire him for this phenomenal restraint. No one knows more than him, how the West (politicos and press) bandy him personally and his country around for absoutely no reason. The Russians are peaceloving folks, and just want to be left alone.
Putin remarked how to "attack Russia" has become "a sport, a new sport, who makes the loudest statements." And then he went full Kipling: "Russia is attacked here and there for no reason. And of course, all sorts of petty Tabaquis [jackals] are running around like Tabaqui ran around Shere Khan [the tiger] – everything is like in Kipling's book – howling along and ready to serve their sovereign. Kipling was a great writer".
For those who haven't read The Jungle Book , Shere Khan is US - and the story doesn't end well for him.
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Jan 07, 2021 | Stephen Wertheim @stephenwertheim Jan 1
"The danger for American elites is not that the U.S. may become less able to accomplish geopolitical objectives. Rather, it is that more Americans might begin to question the logic of U.S. global hegemony," writes @RichardHanania :Qiao Collective @qiaocollective Jan 1Qiao Collective @qiaocollective@qiaocollective 6hTHIS is why the U.S. maintains a rotating cast of "evil" countries to demonize. Whether its Russia, China, the DPRK, Iran, Cuba, or Venezuela, Americans will always find a way to externalize and blame the internal violence of their capitalist imperialist system on foreign foes.
@qiaocollective@qiaocollective 6hWhen will Americans get it through their head that the U.S. is NOT a "democracy" that needs to be "defended" because it was NEVER a democracy to begin with. The problem isn't other countries that you've been brainwashed to hate. It is YOUR capitalist imperialist system country.
@qiaocollectiveThe definition of insanity is watching your colonial, capitalist, imperialist country time and time again inflict mass murder and violence both domestically and abroad and still thinking your country is a "democracy" that must be defended from "authoritarian" countries abroad.
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Apr 25, 2021 | off-guardian.org
Censorship Saves Lives
Another Guardian article from this week warns of "pro-Kremlin outlets" spreading "coronavirus disinformation".
Nick Cohen has an " op ed on the same subject, urging action against free speech so that "Russian meddling" doesn't persuade us all to break quarantine and rush outside like lunatics.
He spent the last four years comparing Jeremy Corbyn to Stalin, and now he's arguing that Facebook and YouTube should do some Stalinist censoring of their platforms in line with government policy.
Has no one at Graun HQ even noticed that the Kremlin (as well as China) is actually in lockstep with the West on the issue of covid19? Or does no whisper of reality percolate through their glassy walls any more?
"Pro-Kremlin" and "pro-China" are labels which have literally lost all meaning in face of an almost totally unified global response to Covid19, and yet, if Nick has his way, they will be used to destroy any semblance of alternative media in Western society
His article's headline " Social media no longer tolerates toxic lies? Don't believe a word of it ", makes the intent plain. He is returning to the theme that big tech companies have to do their part to make sure Russians and "conspiracy theorists" don't harm our society.
But this time he is overtly demanding wrong-thinking people (specifically David Icke in this instance) should be un-personed and barred from social media to "protect public health".
At one point in his incoherent diatribe he even cites "conspiracy theorists" alleged "antisemitism" (without any evidence to back it up). A beautiful example of what Huey Long called "fascism coming in the name of anti-fascism".
Nick doesn't care about that. He's just here to promote authoritarianism and chew gum, and he's all out of gum. He's a massive hypocrite. Nothing more needs to be said.
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Nov 30, 2020 | www.mintpressnews.com
With election fever still gripping the U.S., talk of rigging or interference in the democratic process is reaching new levels, high enough that even Hollywood legend Angelina Jolie is talking about it. In an extraordinary interview in Time magazine, the star of "Wanted, Maleficent, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider," sat down with the former head of the UK's MI6 spy network, Sir Alex Younger, to ask how worrying the threat from Russia or China really is.
"Russia feels threatened by the quality of our alliances and, even in the current environment, the quality of our democratic institutions. It sets out to denigrate them, and it uses intelligence services to that end. It is a serious problem, and we should organize to prevent it," the British spook told the actress.
Younger also went on to discuss the rise of China, and how the West must act to challenge the supposed threat Beijing poses. "We are going to have two sharply different value systems in operation on the same planet for the foreseeable future. We mustn't be naïve. We need to retain the capacity to defend ourselves," he told Jolie.
Never challenging him, Jolie even asked the head of perhaps the world's most notorious spying agency how we can protect ourselves from fake information.
To some, the pairing of a Hollywood star and a veteran spymaster might seem strange. But, in reality, the silver screen and the national security state have always been intimately intertwined. And as much as Jolie presents herself as a leading humanitarian, even being appointed as a Special Envoy for the UN Commission for Refugees, she has spent an inordinate amount of her free time rubbing shoulders with some of the world's worst human rights abuses.
At World Refugee Day in 2005, Jolie shared a stage with then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice was a key player in the Bush administration, responsible for the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, two of the world's worst humanitarian and refugee crises that continue to plague the planet to this day.
Jolie herself has slowly become a leading member of the U.S. national security apparatus, joining the influential and well-endowed Council on Foreign Relations think tank in 2007, and penning a joint op-ed in The New York Times with John McCain two years ago calling for U.S. intervention in Syria and Myanmar. "Around the world, there is profound concern that America is giving up the mantle of global leadership," they questionably asserted, decrying America's "steady retreat over the past decade" that has, "dangerously eroded the rule of law," and condemned the Trump administration's inaction in Syria that could have "deterred mass atrocities," and reduced the refugee crisis.
SaltJolie's collaboration with high-level government officials is not limited to her personal life, however. The 45-year-old Californian has also worked closely, and openly, with CIA officials as part of her movies. A case in point is the 2010 blockbuster Salt , where Jolie plays a CIA agent accused of being a Russian spy. The movie was released at the same time as the real-life Anna Chapman scandal, where the Russian national was caught spying for her country inside the U.S., and marked the beginning of hardening American relations with Moscow, ending up at the point where some have declared the beginning of a new Cold War.
" Salt was the first big cultural product reflecting this geopolitical change, for most of the 2000s Hollywood had no interest in evil Russians," Tom Secker, an investigative journalist with SpyCulture.com told MintPress . "If you watch the film the Russian politicians are clearly based on Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev."
Jolie, playing an evil Russian spy in Salt, chokes out an NYPD officer
"We talked to a lot of the women in the CIA," said Jolie of her experiences preparing for her role. She appeared to have nothing but admiration for the organization; "One after the other, they are just these lovely, sweet women that you can‟t imagine being put in a dangerous situation, but they really are," she added. Salt even hired a former CIA officer to be an on-set technical advisor.
A CIA document Secker shared with MintPress highlights the extent of CIA involvement in Hollywood and their reasons for doing so. "In an effort to ensure an accurate portrayal of the men and women of the CIA," it reads. "For years the Agency has worked with creative artists from across the entertainment industry. [The CIA Office of Public Affairs] interacts with directors, producers, screenwriters, authors, documentarians, actors and others to help debunk myths and provide authenticity, and of course to protect Agency equities," it adds. But perhaps the most important reason stated is, "to help prevent inappropriate negative depictions of the Agency," in mass media.
Propaganda on an enormous scaleThe level of state involvement in Salt is far from abnormal. In fact, Alford and Secker's book " National Security Cinema " details how, since 2005, documents they obtained showed that the Department of Defense alone had closely collaborated in the production of over 1,000 movies or TV shows. This includes many of the largest film franchises, such as "Iron Man," "Transformers," "James Bond," and "Mission: Impossible," and hit TV shows like "The Biggest Loser," "Grey's Anatomy," "Master Chef" and "The Price is Right."
In general, the military or the CIA will offer free services to productions, such as the use of prohibitively expensive military equipment, or technical direction, in exchange for editorial control over scripts. This allows the agencies to make sure the power, prestige, and integrity of these organizations are not challenged. Sometimes entire movies are radically rewritten.
"The Department of Defense actually apologized in their covering letter to the producers of "Hulk" (2003), since the changes they required were so extensive," Dr. Matthew Alford of the University of Bath told MintPress .
But really the disturbing thing here is the pattern and the scale What I suggest is that we focus on the deliberate, major, secretive pressures that rewrite scripts -- and we find they're all on the side of the national security state. Systematically scrubbed from the screen is an unsavoury century of military history including war crimes, illegal arms sales, racism and sexual assault, torture, coups, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction. It amounts to the airbrushing of an entire mediated culture."
Thus, the large majority of big-budget productions featuring military or intelligence services have been greenlighted by the national security state, who have negotiated for control over the message in order to better propagandize both Americans and the global public. However, serious antiwar content rarely makes it to network TV or Hollywood drawing boards, so wholescale interference is usually unnecessary.
In 2014, former Deputy Counsel or Acting General Counsel of the CIA, John Rizzo, wrote that his organization "has long had a special relationship with the entertainment industry, devoting considerable attention to fostering relationships with Hollywood movers and shakers -- studio executives, producers, directors, big-name actors." Many of America's most familiar faces have visited the organization's headquarters in Langley, VA, including Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Mike Myers, Bryan Cranston, and Tom Cruise.
In recent years, collaboration has become even more overt. The Department of Defense even tweeted out during the Oscars how proud it is to work so closely with Hollywood to further its own image.
https://twitter.com/deptofdefense/status/970461390283587585?lang=en
Meanwhile, the latest series of the hit spy show "Jack Ryan," for instance, has the eponymous CIA hero travel to Venezuela to help overthrow tyrannical dictator Nicolas Reyes (a clear allusion to current president Nicolas Maduro). John Krasinski, who plays Ryan, said that he worked closely with the Agency in order to make the show more realistic. Krasinski also described the CIA as amazingly "apolitical." "They're always trying to do the right thing," he said of them, claiming they "care about the country in a bigger, more idealistic way."
Last month, a real CIA agent, Matthew John Heath, was arrested outside Venezuela's largest oil refinery carrying explosives, a grenade launcher, a submachine gun, and stacks of U.S. dollars.
"Probably Hollywood is full of CIA agents and we just don't know it. And I wouldn't be surprised at all to discover that this was extremely common," said "Batman" star Ben Affleck in 2012, before going to describe himself, perhaps jokingly, as a CIA agent himself.
https://cdn.iframe.ly/VKxIpdm?iframe=card-small&v=1&app=1
Propaganda worksThe effect of years of propaganda has been to improve the standing of the deep state and make the American public more conducive to supporting the tactics of the CIA and the military. One academic study found that showing torture scenes from the hit spy series "24" to liberal college students made them far more likely to support the use of it against anyone deemed an enemy of the state.
Democrat-aligned voters' opinion of the FBI has been steadily rising over the last decade, to the point that 77% hold a favorable view of the institution (and almost two-thirds of the country supports the CIA).
Thus, while the entertainment industry might be liberal in that it largely opposes Trump and donates to the Democratic Party, it works closely to support and uphold the national security state, promotes ultra-patriotism and American aggression throughout the world. While Jolie might present herself as a champion of human rights, working with the very institutions responsible for destroying those rights around the globe undermines this assertion.
Feature photo | Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie addresses a press conference at Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, Feb. 5, 2019. Photo | AP
Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent . He has also contributed to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting , The Guardian , Salon , The Grayzone , Jacobin Magazine , Common Dreams the American Herald Tribune and The Canary .
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round-color: rgb(222, 227, 233); text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial;"> Then, and only then, will foreign policy change under the US 2 party self-enrichment system.Apr 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
uncle tungsten , Apr 19 2021 20:48 utc | 40
I think Scott Ritter is engaging in an imaginative future if he thinks the 'hate russia' team has no successors. The academy will be full of them just itching for an interns job with a congresscritter.
Speaking of warmongers, where is Tony Blair these days? Could he be the USA useful idiot egging Boris on to sail a warship or two to the Black Sea? He never met a war he didn't like, did the 'hard man' act for Bush the fool, and has been traipsing about any warzone pontificating for a fat fee and would be right at home being the bumper-upper for Boris. It would all be hush hush as he is hated in UK.
In 2018 Boris appointed the previous UK ambassador to Turkey, Richard Moore, to the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). He was formerly the Director General, Political, at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Moore attended St George's College, Weybridge. Batchelor's degree at Worcester College, Oxford. He then won a Kennedy Scholarship to study at the Kennedy School of Government in Harvard University. In 2007, he attended the Stanford Executive Programme.
The ducks have been in alignment for some time.
powerandpeople , Apr 19 2021 20:49 utc | 41
juliania , Apr 19 2021 21:04 utc | 43Excellent article, B highlights that change won't come from the new administration BECAUSE money flows to the congressional-industrial-military cabal only if the existing regime is in power AND USA remains a 2 party system - one 'better' than China.
This principal was echoed in November 2020 by ex US Army Danny Sjursen
"...it's obvious that the Biden bunch has no desire to slow down, no less halt, the "revolving door" that connects national security work in the government and jobs or security consulting positions in the defense industry. The same goes for the think tanks that the arms producers amply fund to justify the whole circus...Or consider retired Marine Corps major general turned defense consultant Arnold Punaro who recently said of Biden's coming tenure, "I think the industry will have, when it comes to national security, a very positive view."
Given the evidence that business-as-usual will continue in the Biden years, perhaps it's time to take that advice from Cornel West, absorb the truth about Biden's future national security squad, and act accordingly. There's no top-down salvation on the agenda -- not from Joe or his crew of consummate insiders. Pressure and change will flow from the grassroots or it won't come at all."
Salvation can only COME FROM the good people of America
But the very voting system prevents other voices being heard. There is no proportional representation, therefore no other views than the highly paid military-industrial consultants, the merchants of violence.
The Tweedledum and Tweedledee American political system is ossified, inflexible, suppressive.
A giant echo chamber.
Hello! Hello! anyone with a brain in there?
The echos bounce and fade. No reply.
American foreign policy is brain dead.
Until compulsory military service is Brought back to USA, all children of the highest earning bracket straight to the front line, no soft touch deployments, no bone-spur deferment.
Then, and only then, will foreign policy change under the US 2 party self-enrichment system.
uncle tungsten , Apr 19 2021 21:25 utc | 47Stonebird @ 36 writes:
"...For four years, both "choices" were hammered by the Democrats into the supine brains of the US masses. which has given rise to "automatic" and forceful unthinking attitudes..."
This is not true, and pardon me for saying so because indeed there are elements of truth in what you are saying. It is NOT the US masses that are grabbing guns and ammunition and commiting mayhem on their fellow citizens. It is the gullible and the weak and the mentally disturbed, who are present in any large and stressed society. They probably match the one percenters at the top and cohorts in the ten percent - (just a guess on my part) but they are NOT the 'masses'.
The masses have bucked the mainstream mantras of the past O-T and now B years. We don't have power - power is as you say with the rich, with the party demagogues, with the leeches, and as b points out, their rule is coming to an end but they still hold the reins of power. Whether or not Biden saw, or Trump saw, or even Obama saw, that this is not the way it ought to be - they have each been powerless to do anything about it in a meaningful way so far.
Don't give up. It's a long haul but here's where I agree with the TINA principle. There is no alternative. We just have to keep on keeping on. The Dems will lose power in Congress come next elections. There will be inroads made, and if Republicans get elected, so be it. A few more will have better souls, and inch by inch the oldies will have to yield. It's gonna happen. And, in answer to a post above:
What has Putinist regime "restraint " achieved so far except brazen falsehood and enmity?[Posted by: Biswapriya Purkayast | Apr 19 2021 17:17 ]
Putin and his cohorts have achieved the reinstatement of the Russian Federation with alignment with China and the tipping of the balance of world understanding in their favor. This is a force mightier than the US and western allies neoliberal, oligarchic agenda, and with patience and firm commitment it will prevail.
Thank God.
uncle tungsten , Apr 19 2021 21:42 utc | 50alaff #27
++
Thank you for that incisive statement. One only has to watch those 5 minute utoob by Steve Pieczenic I posted to get a sense of the totality of USA dominance and imagined dominance and the malign drivers of its reach. I know he is a blowhard but he was at the apex of the dirty game. He is a rigid anticommunist, he talks as if Putin is one of their successes, he hates Xi so he must be alarmed that they have been brought into anti empire unity.
The USA has striven to obtain full spectrum dominance and they appear to have gotten close in terms of public political imagination, western political elites almost entirely in the 'hate russia' camp, useful idiots snapping at the Russian and Chinese heels, permanent state of conflict awareness and uncertainty in the public mind, perfection of colour revolution technique and its social infrastructure development mechanism.
Conventional weaponry has slipped their grasp. But that is matched by an alternative that they won't hesitate to use.
uncle tungsten , Apr 19 2021 22:27 utc | 53juliania #43
Putin and his cohorts have achieved the reinstatement of the Russian Federation with alignment with China and the tipping of the balance of world understanding in their favor. This is a force mightier than the US and western allies neoliberal, oligarchic agenda, and with patience and firm commitment it will prevail.Thank you, that is the essence of diplomacy and the avoidance of conflict and even war.
War must end. It is an ignorant reversal of human progress, it poisons minds and the earth itself. Its legacy is one of tears and material loss. It give no one person of good will any benefit. It slaughters the innocent!! children, women and men and our environment. It is the game of ignorance asserting superiority over thought and imagination.
It is the daring imagination of betterment that motivates the development of OBOR and the east to west transit corridor in Russia. It is imagination of betterment to build trade and access to economy and elevation from poverty that is of the utmost benefit to us humans sharing and caring for this beautiful planet.
If the west cast off its parasitic mentality toward the other and embraced the same daring imagination for its people's betterment they might come close to the achievements we have seen in Russia and China and elsewhere that the philosophy is paramount. There is always hope and the chance that might come about.
Intensifying anti Russian policies will result in the same outcomes the USA achieved in their anti Iranian policies.
EJ Magnier reports on the recent JCPOA members meeting:"The Islamic Republic proved to be a shark with sharp teeth during its negotiation with the signatories (Russia, China, France, Great Britain and Germany) of the nuclear deal in Vienna, leaving few choices to the negotiators. Iran showed how complex and inflexible its position is with the most powerful county in the world, forbidding the US envoy to join the mediators in the same room because Donald Trump revoked its 2015 nuclear deal agreement. Moreover, Iran used the Israeli sabotage actions against the Natanz nuclear facility as an excuse to hit Israel, the US and all European negotiators who side with the Americans...
...Iran did not ask for a guarantee against another Trump-like decision – which revoked the nuclear deal – in the future because its nuclear capability is the guarantee. Iran is not asking for a guarantee from China and Russia, which are under US sanctions. Iran exhausted its patience in 2018 when it waited for an entire year without using its right to gradually withdraw from the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). Iran then believed Europe might come forward and hold to its commitments even if the US pulled back. That was not the case, and Tehran is now aware that Europe and the US have the same objectives hidden behind different behaviours.Today it is known that Iran is enriching uranium up to 60% and can reach 90% in several months. This does not mean Iran is necessarily producing nuclear weapons, but it is enough to cross the West's red lines. If the US sanctions are not lifted or partially lifted, if the deal is revoked or other sanctions are imposed in the future, Iran will fall back into its complete nuclear cycle without any warning."
Posted by: powerandpeople | Apr 19 2021 20:49 utc | 41
Stonebird @ 36 writes:
"...For four years, both "choices" were hammered by the Democrats into the supine brains of the US masses. which has given rise to "automatic" and forceful unthinking attitudes..."
This is not true, and pardon me for saying so because indeed there are elements of truth in what you are saying. It is NOT the US masses that are grabbing guns and ammunition and commiting mayhem on their fellow citizens. It is the gullible and the weak and the mentally disturbed, who are present in any large and stressed society. They probably match the one percenters at the top and cohorts in the ten percent - (just a guess on my part) but they are NOT the 'masses'.
The masses have bucked the mainstream mantras of the past O-T and now B years. We don't have power - power is as you say with the rich, with the party demagogues, with the leeches, and as b points out, their rule is coming to an end but they still hold the reins of power. Whether or not Biden saw, or Trump saw, or even Obama saw, that this is not the way it ought to be - they have each been powerless to do anything about it in a meaningful way so far.
Don't give up. It's a long haul but here's where I agree with the TINA principle. There is no alternative. We just have to keep on keeping on. The Dems will lose power in Congress come next elections. There will be inroads made, and if Republicans get elected, so be it. A few more will have better souls, and inch by inch the oldies will have to yield. It's gonna happen. And, in answer to a post above:
What has Putinist regime "restraint " achieved so far except brazen falsehood and enmity?
[Posted by: Biswapriya Purkayast | Apr 19 2021 17:17 ]
Putin and his cohorts have achieved the reinstatement of the Russian Federation with alignment with China and the tipping of the balance of world understanding in their favor. This is a force mightier than the US and western allies neoliberal, oligarchic agenda, and with patience and firm commitment it will prevail.
Thank God.
Posted by: juliania | Apr 19 2021 21:04 utc | 43
alaff #27
++
Thank you for that incisive statement. One only has to watch those 5 minute utoob by Steve Pieczenic I posted to get a sense of the totality of USA dominance and imagined dominance and the malign drivers of its reach. I know he is a blowhard but he was at the apex of the dirty game. He is a rigid anticommunist, he talks as if Putin is one of their successes, he hates Xi so he must be alarmed that they have been brought into anti empire unity.
The USA has striven to obtain full spectrum dominance and they appear to have gotten close in terms of public political imagination, western political elites almost entirely in the 'hate russia' camp, useful idiots snapping at the Russian and Chinese heels, permanent state of conflict awareness and uncertainty in the public mind, perfection of colour revolution technique and its social infrastructure development mechanism.
Conventional weaponry has slipped their grasp. But that is matched by an alternative that they won't hesitate to use.
Posted by: uncle tungsten | Apr 19 2021 21:25 utc | 47
juliania #43
Putin and his cohorts have achieved the reinstatement of the Russian Federation with alignment with China and the tipping of the balance of world understanding in their favor. This is a force mightier than the US and western allies neoliberal, oligarchic agenda, and with patience and firm commitment it will prevail.
Thank you, that is the essence of diplomacy and the avoidance of conflict and even war.
War must end. It is an ignorant reversal of human progress, it poisons minds and the earth itself. Its legacy is one of tears and material loss. It give no one person of good will any benefit. It slaughters the innocent!! children, women and men and our environment. It is the game of ignorance asserting superiority over thought and imagination.
It is the daring imagination of betterment that motivates the development of OBOR and the east to west transit corridor in Russia. It is imagination of betterment to build trade and access to economy and elevation from poverty that is of the utmost benefit to us humans sharing and caring for this beautiful planet.
If the west cast off its parasitic mentality toward the other and embraced the same daring imagination for its people's betterment they might come close to the achievements we have seen in Russia and China and elsewhere that the philosophy is paramount. There is always hope and the chance that might come about.
Posted by: uncle tungsten | Apr 19 2021 21:42 utc | 50
Intensifying anti Russian policies will result in the same outcomes the USA achieved in their anti Iranian policies.
EJ Magnier reports on the recent JCPOA members meeting:
"The Islamic Republic proved to be a shark with sharp teeth during its negotiation with the signatories (Russia, China, France, Great Britain and Germany) of the nuclear deal in Vienna, leaving few choices to the negotiators. Iran showed how complex and inflexible its position is with the most powerful county in the world, forbidding the US envoy to join the mediators in the same room because Donald Trump revoked its 2015 nuclear deal agreement. Moreover, Iran used the Israeli sabotage actions against the Natanz nuclear facility as an excuse to hit Israel, the US and all European negotiators who side with the Americans...
...Iran did not ask for a guarantee against another Trump-like decision – which revoked the nuclear deal – in the future because its nuclear capability is the guarantee. Iran is not asking for a guarantee from China and Russia, which are under US sanctions. Iran exhausted its patience in 2018 when it waited for an entire year without using its right to gradually withdraw from the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). Iran then believed Europe might come forward and hold to its commitments even if the US pulled back. That was not the case, and Tehran is now aware that Europe and the US have the same objectives hidden behind different behaviours.Today it is known that Iran is enriching uranium up to 60% and can reach 90% in several months. This does not mean Iran is necessarily producing nuclear weapons, but it is enough to cross the West's red lines. If the US sanctions are not lifted or partially lifted, if the deal is revoked or other sanctions are imposed in the future, Iran will fall back into its complete nuclear cycle without any warning."
Posted by: uncle tungsten | Apr 19 2021 22:27 utc | 53
sset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/4689067"> https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/4689067 Tom , Apr 17 2021 22:07 utc | 40Posted by: Bernard F. | Apr 17 2021 21:21 utc | 38
I suspect Sullivan and Blinken's next gig will be something like that. "We came here to forget", but instead of the French Legion, it will be PMC Wagner.
Personally what I would do would be a Operation Bagration 2.0 at the slightest misstep by Ukraine. There is may too much on the table here. Bio labs, nests of NATO rats, nuclear power plants, NATO missiles on the Ukrainian and Belarus borders with Russia. Time to clear out the rats including Lviv. After disinfecting this part of eastern Europe (again) of that other far more dangerous virus, Nazism, life will be much more peaceful in that part of the world, and likely by the domino effect (yes I actually said that!) to other places in the world plagued by US exceptionalism.
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Oui , Apr 19 2021 19:11 utc | 23... two decades a coordinated anti-Russia propaganda originating from the U.K. [MI-6 – its former spies – Khodorkovsky - The Interpreter - Henry Jackson Society] and Washington DC a nest of anti-Russia lobbyists [Atlantic Council – BellingCat, etc]. In fact it's the vast majority with groundless and poor reasoning, these folks despise everything left, Socialist and Communist. Too many years and too much wealth have pushed the anti-Russia agenda. The new generation with social media lack comprehension what information is published and with what political agenda.
Due to the 9/11 attacks on America. the US and UK gave new life and purpose to NATO. From Afghanistan the expeditionary force was sent to Libya and Syria. The colour revolutions gave blood to anti-Putin rhetoric. US politics of both parties tried to divide the EU into Old and New Europe. The criminal acts of CIA torture, rendition and black sites made a number of states accomplishes in war crimes. No issue a decade later with drone assassinations. Calling out "Putin" as killer is ridiculous looking in the mirror how many tens and hundreds of thousands have died on the battlefield at the hands of the UK/US and allies. And the sales of arms, munitions and lethal weapons reach new heights in the Middle East and warring parties.
OCCRP Report: The Pentagon Is Spending Up To $2.2 Billion on Soviet-Style Arms for Syrian Rebels
The Czech Republic is responsible for arms and munitions delivery to Bulgarian arms dealers working with Pentagon contracts. These ended up in the Ukraine, Syria, Libya and Yemen. The bomb blast in Vrbetice most likely saved many (innocent) lives.
Some repentants
Jaap de Hoop Scheffer in Op-Ed of Dec. 2017 - 'NATO should not have committed to membership of Ukraine and Georgia'
In the recent past I have written about Legatum at a time Anne Applebaum found her employ at the think tank. The red alert signs and alarm bells were up at the time and I gave some background information. The first lady of Poland (almost) and her hubby former UK citizen and CIA agent Radek Sikorski of Afghan and Angola fame.
Anne Applebaum's Confession
Anne Applebaum: how my old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit | The Guardian – July 2020 |
Les7 , Apr 19 2021 19:53 utc | 28
Patroklos , Apr 19 2021 20:02 utc | 29After 50 years of hate creation(cold war 1)
After 15 years of chaos creation
After 15 years of slander andback-stabbing
We are to believe this cabal of humanity hating zealots will fade into the background??
Because facts will matter???
Facts have never mattered. In this post-modern illusion our leaders call a reset, facts actually have negative value...sorta like negative interest rates.
Expect insanity to multiply at the same rate as the money supply expands
Adam Curtis' new documentary series ("I Just Can't Get You out of my Head") deals (in part) with the way the West's entire worldview sees everything in simplistic Manichean terms, like Star Wars. The West is always good (even when they act immorally) and the baddies are always lone rogues, like a spaghetti Western. WW2 shaped the West's entire thinking about its role in the world: the Allies are on the side of decency and freedom while the enemy is simply evil through and through, beyond redemption. A parade of baddies from Hitler to Castro, Uncle Ho, Khomeini, Gaddafi, Hussein, Assad, Putin and Xi. Bond movies and Hollywood write the scripts, the MSM pumps out the pulp. No one wants to hear that history is a tad more complicated than bogeymen vs. Marvel superheroes, but then history does have a lovely way of biting people on the ass...
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Why Washington's Anti-Russian Policies Are Likely To Intensify Mina , Apr 19 2021 16:49 utc | 1
Thanks to a monoculture of anti-Russia hawks in U.S. policy institutions relations between the U.S. and Russia are likely to further decline. But some hope might be seen at the horizon.
Scott Ritter predicts the end of a generation of anti-Russian influencers in Washington DC who depict Russia and is policies as being run by just one man:
These "Putin whisperers" infiltrated every aspect of American culture and politics, their writings achieving near-scripture-like reception in the pages of American newspapers and political journals, and the authors of this intellectual dreck being offered prime seats at the table of national security policymaking, either on the National Security Council, or as a National Intelligence Officer.
...
These "Putin Whisperers" thrived during the administration of President Barack Obama, led by the likes of Michael McFaul, and achieved near-critical mass during the Trump administration, empowered by overly politicized claims of collusion with Russia by people in the Trump circle. They continue to play an important role today, filling the airwaves and pages with anti-Putin propaganda whose cumulative effect is to dumb down the American public by demonizing Russia and its president to the point that any accusation will be accepted at face value , regardless of the lack of corroborating evidence or the improbable veracity of its claim; the recent scandal over allegations that Russia paid the Taliban bounties to kill Americans in Afghanistan serves as an apt illustration of this phenomenon.Unfortunately the constant demonization of Russia's president by the 'Putin-whisperers' has already led to some tragic consequences :
A children's author and parish councillor died after a neighbour with mental health issues shot him in the face and stamped on his head, believing he worked for Vladimir Putin and was to blame for the spread of Covid-19, an inquest heard.But the danger of seeing everything caused by just one man is much greater. It explains the confused policies of the Biden administration which may lead towards war.
Ritter argues that Biden trapped himself:
Biden is a prisoner of his own anti-Russian rhetoric, influenced in large part by the need to be seen as responding to a domestic political prerogative founded on decades of Russia - and Putin-bashing at the hands of the "Putin whisperers" and their ilk. It is one thing to spout off as a candidate for president; it is an altogether different reality to be serving as president, where words and actions have life-or-death consequences.As the realities set in the people and their policies will have to change:
These are policies pushed and promoted by the "Putin whisperers." For the moment, their will continues to prevail. But their days are numbered, as realpolitik pragmatists in the White House, Pentagon and Intelligence Community are recognizing the reality that the days of taking for granted US global hegemony are over, and that for the United States to remain relevant, it must adapt to the reality of a multi-polar world, and Russia's rightful role therein. This will not happen overnight, but it is in the process of happening. In promoting and supporting Biden's latest round of sanctions, the "Putin whisperers" have reached their high-water mark. From here on out, their influence will begin to ebb as the national security demand for fact-based assessments outstrips the domestic political need for fact-free propaganda.I am not that optimistic. The Blob is resistant to change because those who are inside it tend to bite away anyone with even a slightly different view.
Consider the case of Matthew Rojansky, Director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is known as a middle-of-the-road expert of U.S. and Soviet/Russian relations - not a hawk, but also not an appeaser.
Rojansky was supposed to chair the Russia desk in Biden's National Security Council. As soon as that became know the 'Putin Whisperers' came out in force to fight the nomination. Axios led the charge :
Cont. reading: Why Washington's Anti-Russian Policies Are Likely To Intensify
Posted by b at 16:38 UTC | Comments (54)
I am surprised that the Russians did not "leak" a few videos from the EU-sponsored refugee camps in Greece. People becoming mad, violence, suicide attempts, it would be enough to close for good the debate on Russian prisons.
vetinLA , Apr 19 2021 16:51 utc | 2
Increasingly, people need to disregard all rhetoric coming from the U$A. We're immersed in a society, at present, that is coming apart at the seams.Donbass Lives Matter , Apr 19 2021 16:58 utc | 3Just exactly what our ruling elites want, to "grease the ways" for the new feudalism to thrive.
It will continue for these reasons:Bernard F. , Apr 19 2021 17:09 utc | 41) Conflict is a career opportunity. Peace is a bad way to get the grants, bribe money, and stature that the DC sociopaths want. No one whose career depends on conflict gets promoted without conflict.
2) They believe (possibly correctly) that they can attack Russia indirectly, or directly via proxy, and that Russia will only defend, rather than going on a counteroffensive.
3) Sociopaths have a psychological attachment to doing bad things. If a sociopath were given a choice between scamming a client out of $1000 and earning that amount by selling a good product, the sociopath would choose the former option every time, even if the profit and effort were the same.Carl D , Apr 19 2021 17:16 utc | 5Thanks b.
A lot to read tonight at work :-))When rats in the same group start fighting each other because neither domination nor escape is possible, it is a good sign of collapse.
Willingness is not ability
https://youtu.be/xBWmkwaTQ0kAnd, by the way, Washington (even american people) isn't the unique policy maker.
As James wrote
@ james | Apr 19 2021 4:19 utc | 62
[...]
russia leadership under putin and company have played their hand exceedingly well and have not got sucked into playing the game the way the west has wanted them to[...]
I posted it in the morning
Putin, as a leader of a country with 180 millions citizens and a huge history (and the wounds of USSR collapsus) must consider "Overton window". He done it very well.
As a "Commander in Chief", he must consider first, not to be defeated.
Sun Tzu said: The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy. #
To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.
We must stay focuse have at some facts (not fake) news.
As b. focused, Russia weaponized...a lot
Russian new weapons/military doctrine since 2010, even not Russian propaganda.https://spacenews.com/new-reports-highlight-russian-chinese-advances-in-space-weapons/
They gonna permanently change the meaning of "intelligence", till the word indicates stupidityBiswapriya Purkayast , Apr 19 2021 17:17 utc | 6Sanity will never set in without a massive defeat for Amerikastani interests. The most obvious two, which are not mutually exclusive, are Occupied Syria (including the Muhaysinic Emirate of Idlibistan and the Kyrd zionistan) and Ukranazistan. Russia needs to move on both immediately and Brook no further delay. What has Putinist regime "restraint " achieved so far except brazen falsehood and enmity?Virgile , Apr 19 2021 17:23 utc | 8vk , Apr 19 2021 17:36 utc | 9It is possible that Biden is acting tough with symbolic sanctions to divert the attention from the reality that the Nord Stream 2 is well and soon alive. He also gets praise from the anti-russia
elements in his government.
Yet Ritter is right in a way. The tit-for-tat that Russia has decided to start will escalate to the point of a serious accident that may shake the USA. That Biden qualify Russia's response to the sanctions as "escalatory" shows that he took note that Russia will not stop retaliating. He is starting to worry that this path will lead to a paralysis of the diplomatic exchange on several important issues and to violent consequences detrimental to the USA and its allies.
Is Biden still mentally capable of an independent opinion?Feral Finster , Apr 19 2021 17:37 utc | 10Let me consult the oracles...
Here's the answer they gave me:
US, allies besieging Russia offers lesson for China: Global Times editorial
There are complex historical reasons for Central and Eastern European countries to tilt toward the US and become "anti-Russia," which is difficult for outsiders to comment on. It is a pity that internal disintegration rather than coercion from the US had directly led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Russian Federation was one of the main promoters of the disintegration, and the original agreement to replace the Soviet Union with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was signed by Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Russian leaders who had destroyed the Soviet Union had no idea what would happen to their country afterward.The collapse of the Soviet Union has brought about geopolitical changes globally, and the evaluation of the event is destined to vary from country to country and from time to time. But it has become increasingly clear that Russia has been the biggest loser from that collapse.
Many Russians once believed that when the Communist Party stepped down and the Soviet Union collapsed, the US and the West would embrace Russia and respect them who had taken the initiative to end the Cold War. The reality, however, is harsh. Moscow has received no gratitude or kindness from the West. From the moment the Soviet Union collapsed, the US has arrogantly treated Russia as a defeated country in the Cold War, engaging in all possible moves to suppress Russia at will.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster for Russia. As the dominant power in the Soviet Union, if it chose to support reforms to solve problems at the beginning, Russia could pay a much smaller price than the geopolitical price it would pay in the following 30 years. Back then, Moscow had a broad sphere of influence and powerful control capability that it could act independently and defiantly against Washington. But it has ceded those geopolitical resources, giving up its advantages.
The US' vicious attitude toward Russia offers a glimpse into the brutality of great power competition and helps people see through Washington's geopolitical manipulation measures. The US portrayed its Cold War with the Soviet Union as an ideological confrontation to conceal its intention to dominate the world alone. Many people, including Russians, believed that a political change of course would fundamentally change their relationship with the US, and that Russia could thus integrate into the West and become a dignified member of the Group of Eight.
Ian2 , Apr 19 2021 18:02 utc | 14Swear to God that Ritter is correct.
However, if the foreign policy establishment learned nothing and suffered neither personal nor professional consequences from the War on Iraq, what makes Ritter so sure that anything will be different this time?
fyi , Apr 19 2021 18:04 utc | 15The first cold war lasted 44 years. I wonder how long this one will last?
Babyl-on , Apr 19 2021 18:09 utc | 16Mr. vk
This attitude was not uncommon among others, such as the Eastern Europeans.
Before 1991, they were vassals of USSR, now they are vassals of vassals - a notch down the pecking order.
In Iran, there have been several million people - largely inhabiting the Greater Tehran area and rather influential - who shared an analogous attitude as the Russians did before 1991.
Fortunately for Iran, Judeo-Christians tried to destroy her by trying to destroy her economy.
Now, that population, has no leg to stand on - they are discredited domestically as their programme of productive engagement with the West turned out to be a fool's errand.
Russians, in 1991, did not expect USSR to break-up, they did not understand that USSR was unified in the corpus of the Red Tsar - just like the Russian Empire was unified (like the United Kingdom) in the person of the Emperor of Russia.
In an analogous manner, the "Secularist Liberals" in Iran, denizens of Tehran - should they get to power, will preside over the disintegration of Iran, since she is unified in the Shia Religion.
There are fools everywhere.
Donbass Lives Matter , Apr 19 2021 18:30 utc | 18It is indeed necessary for the US to recognize the reality of a multi-polar world. However, let us be accurate, the West is one and only one empire of the Five Eyes alliance and not just the US.
Ultimately the question is this: Will the Western empire accept it has failed and will never control the entire world or will it use the nuclear weapons it used twice to become a global empire to ruin the world for anyone else?oldhippie , Apr 19 2021 18:42 utc | 19To paraphrase John McCain, the Ukraine is a suicide bomber masquerading as a country.
vetinLA , Apr 19 2021 19:18 utc | 26Bill Browder is mentioned in b's top post.
Browder's grandfather is Earl Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party USA. Now freely admitted that he held that post on the payroll of FBI and Office of Naval Intelligence. Bill merely continues the family business of damaging Russia by any means possible.
Yes, Russophobia is a very durable policy.
g @ 11 said;
" The CIA/Establishment/Neocon/liberal doctrine of a unitary imperial superpower that must assimilate all of creation into its usurious, profit making empire, or else, is challenged seriously by few."
There is NOTHING "liberal" in how our latest empire persues it's prerogatives of global corporate hegemony.
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Oui , Apr 19 2021 19:11 utc | 23... two decades a coordinated anti-Russia propaganda originating from the U.K. [MI-6 – its former spies – Khodorkovsky - The Interpreter - Henry Jackson Society] and Washington DC a nest of anti-Russia lobbyists [Atlantic Council – BellingCat, etc]. In fact it's the vast majority with groundless and poor reasoning, these folks despise everything left, Socialist and Communist. Too many years and too much wealth have pushed the anti-Russia agenda. The new generation with social media lack comprehension what information is published and with what political agenda.
Due to the 9/11 attacks on America. the US and UK gave new life and purpose to NATO. From Afghanistan the expeditionary force was sent to Libya and Syria. The colour revolutions gave blood to anti-Putin rhetoric. US politics of both parties tried to divide the EU into Old and New Europe. The criminal acts of CIA torture, rendition and black sites made a number of states accomplishes in war crimes. No issue a decade later with drone assassinations. Calling out "Putin" as killer is ridiculous looking in the mirror how many tens and hundreds of thousands have died on the battlefield at the hands of the UK/US and allies. And the sales of arms, munitions and lethal weapons reach new heights in the Middle East and warring parties.
OCCRP Report: The Pentagon Is Spending Up To $2.2 Billion on Soviet-Style Arms for Syrian Rebels
The Czech Republic is responsible for arms and munitions delivery to Bulgarian arms dealers working with Pentagon contracts. These ended up in the Ukraine, Syria, Libya and Yemen. The bomb blast in Vrbetice most likely saved many (innocent) lives.
Some repentants
Jaap de Hoop Scheffer in Op-Ed of Dec. 2017 - 'NATO should not have committed to membership of Ukraine and Georgia'
In the recent past I have written about Legatum at a time Anne Applebaum found her employ at the think tank. The red alert signs and alarm bells were up at the time and I gave some background information. The first lady of Poland (almost) and her hubby former UK citizen and CIA agent Radek Sikorski of Afghan and Angola fame.
Anne Applebaum's Confession
Anne Applebaum: how my old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit | The Guardian – July 2020 |
Les7 , Apr 19 2021 19:53 utc | 28
Patroklos , Apr 19 2021 20:02 utc | 29After 50 years of hate creation(cold war 1)
After 15 years of chaos creation
After 15 years of slander andback-stabbing
We are to believe this cabal of humanity hating zealots will fade into the background??
Because facts will matter???
Facts have never mattered. In this post-modern illusion our leaders call a reset, facts actually have negative value...sorta like negative interest rates.
Expect insanity to multiply at the same rate as the money supply expands
Adam Curtis' new documentary series ("I Just Can't Get You out of my Head") deals (in part) with the way the West's entire worldview sees everything in simplistic Manichean terms, like Star Wars. The West is always good (even when they act immorally) and the baddies are always lone rogues, like a spaghetti Western. WW2 shaped the West's entire thinking about its role in the world: the Allies are on the side of decency and freedom while the enemy is simply evil through and through, beyond redemption. A parade of baddies from Hitler to Castro, Uncle Ho, Khomeini, Gaddafi, Hussein, Assad, Putin and Xi. Bond movies and Hollywood write the scripts, the MSM pumps out the pulp. No one wants to hear that history is a tad more complicated than bogeymen vs. Marvel superheroes, but then history does have a lovely way of biting people on the ass...
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Dennis18 , Apr 19 2021 19:13 utc | 25No one fact check's the claims made by the intelligent agencies. Bernie was told the Russians wanted him to win the election and he jump right in the laps of the liars. Trump knew more before he was president than he did once he was elected. That is why General Flynn was removed under false charges. He knew what was what. I remember the head of the CIA told Trump that the Russian has killed ducks and poison children. Trump fell for the lie hook line and casino
Now we have a president that has mental issues and already believes the Russian are dirty What could go wrong?
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jayc , Apr 17 2021 22:59 utc | 46
Bellingcat is in the middle of the GRU/Czech arms depot explosion story from 2014 - now being described as "defacto act of Russian state terrorism on a NATO soil."
https://twitter.com/_JakubJanda/status/1383515969797038081
It appears the GRU were following closely a movement of arms from the Czech depot to a Bulgarian middleman, meant to be then delivered to Ukraine. The explosion is now attributed to the GRU because of the Petrov/Boshirov ID, and their presumed signature ineffectiveness failing to destroy the arms cache and later failing to kill the Skripals.
Also reports now that the GRU have a super-villain lair in the French Alps
https://www.dw.com/en/russia-posted-gru-agents-in-french-alps-for-eu-ops-report/a-51548648Wolle , Apr 18 2021 10:44 utc | 110
One picture says all about Bellingcraps B*sh*t:
https://twitter.com/200_zoka/status/1383687849816428545
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Apr 19, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
A foreign military bloc of nations is inching closer to Moscow, Vladimir Putin reacts in kind, and somehow Russia is the aggressor. And learned Ph.D.'s scribble on, defying pure logic from Washington's Think Tank Row. Here's the latest sensational proof that the world will never, ever be at peace.
Dr. Mamuka Tsereteli and James Carafano have a new plan for defeating Russia for good. Now get this, in America, we have institutions like The Heritage Foundation that fund supposed research to perpetuate wars. No, really. The latest report of the foundation "Putin Threatens Ukraine -- Here's the Danger and What US, Allies Should Do About It" is a blueprint for continuing friction between west and east. Let's examine the three takeaways Heritage Foundation puts forward.
According to Tsereteli and Carafano, Putin is about to attack Ukraine. These well-paid foreign policy geniuses say a military buildup inside Russian territory, which was in response to threats from Kyiv, proves beyond a doubt the dastardly Putin is about to overrun Russia's neighbor. To quote the report, "Putin plans to use Russian forces in a full-blown military engagement with that country [Ukraine]." Well, let's find out why Russia's president alerted his military.
Didn't I just read how Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba announced that his country's National Security and Defense Council had approved a strategy aimed at retaking Crimea and reintegrating the strategically important peninsula? Yes, I am sure of it. Another Washington think tank has already outlined something called the Crimean Platform Initiative , another genius plan hatched in the bowels of CIA headquarters, to make Crimea an expensive proposition for Russia.
This came into being the instant Joe Biden took the oath of office as president, and it's only part of an overall strategy to engage Russia in a winner take all confrontation that many experts say, is long overdue. And the has taken unilateral aggressive steps toward the Donbass region and any pocket of the pro-Russia sentiment inside Ukraine. A statement by Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova on this issue bears repeating here:
"All efforts by Kyiv to reclaim Crimea are illegitimate and cannot be interpreted in any other way but a threat of aggression against two Russian [federal] subjects. We reiterate that we will consider the participation of any states or organizations in such activities, including the Crimean Platform initiative, as a hostile act against Russia and direct encroachment on its territorial integrity."
Now that we've established who the aggressor is, let's take a look at Tsereteli's and Carafano's next brilliant takeaway point. The dynamic duo of war strategies says cosmetic measures against Russia will not do! The "west" (meaning NATO), they say, needs a more clear strategy. Which certainly means a massive arms buildup west of the Siverskyi Donets River. The Zelensky government is being pushed from Washington to take even more drastic measures to force Russia into a war stance. The editorial board of the Washington Post recently advised Zelensky:
"Mr. Zelensky now has the opportunity to forge a partnership with Mr. Biden that could decisively advance Ukraine's attempt to break free from Russia and join the democratic West. He should seize on it."
So, now that we've shown who is doing the pushing here, let's turn to the final takeaway from Heritage Foundation master strategists. Tsereteli and Carafano come right out and say "countries left outside of NATO will remain targets of Russian aggression and manipulations." So, the purpose of all this supposed spread of militaristic-based democracy is to expand NATO to? I mean, seriously. Washington is not reaching out with the Peace Corps to shore up a budding Eastern European democracy. The United States is kidnapping another former Soviet republic on the way to the big score. My country has military bases in almost every country in the world, has had more wars than the Mongols, and spends more on weapons than everybody else combined – but Russia is being aggressive! Who believes this bullshit?
Let's be real here. First, please understand who is doing the "thinking" there in Washington. Take James Carafano, the former Lt. Colonel who wrote speeches for the head of the U.S. Army Chief of Staff. Carafano teaches at West Point, what the hell else can he advise, of war with Russia does not come about? The man's life is about justifying war. Then there's Mamuka Tsereteli, who's also the Founding Executive Director at the America-Georgia Business Council. America-Georgia business, hmm? I wonder if there is an America-Ukraine business council in the works soon? But, you can see where this new strategy from Heritage Foundation is headed, can't you? Taking advice on foreign policy from these so-called experts is putting the foxes in charge of the hen house. Only they're not as smart as foxes. They don't need to be. The public is just that numbed and misinformed these days.
Is heavily involved in helping promote the EU's Three Seas Initiative (3SI), which is an asymmetrical warfare economic platform to cut Russia off from the EU, and install the U.S. and central European powers in her place in East Europe. This report from Mamuka Tsereteli at Emerging Europe lays out the plan. To learn more about Tsereteli's role, readers should research the so-called Frontier Europe Initiative, currently propagandizing for greater Georgia-Ukraine strategies against Russia. Make no mistake, the narrative and strategies these people are discussing are the precursors to including not only Ukraine in NATO but Georgia as well. Retired Air Force General Phillip Breedlove and former CENTCOM Commander General Joseph Votel are two of the "experts" helping to draft these strategies. And The Heritage Foundation stands center stage of the move for NATO to force Putin and Russia into an inescapable corner.
This report appeared first at New Eastern Outlook
And there, is your true geopolitical Eurasia picture. The "west" will run on to Moscow, start World War III, and then blame Putin for the holocaust.
retrocop 1 day ago
TheABaum 23 hours agoWe protect other countries borders, but not our own. The Pentagon lists military personnel in 514 "outposts" in 45 countries, and the DOD "acknowledges" personnel in more than 160 countries. Not bad for a nation that is essentially bankrupt.
The Count 20 hours ago (Edited)Did you mean entirely bankrupt?
Village-idiot 22 hours ago (Edited)Well, the border to Mexico is not really a border. It's just a never ending supply of cheap labor.
gro_dfd 21 hours ago (Edited)The Globalists really don't like Putin; they don't like anyone who fights them and wins.
Putin already took their Russian central bank away from them.
He is also protecting the Russian culture, and is quickly turning Russia into the most Christian country in the world (around 85% Christian so far).
Putin reputably hates paedophiles as much as Trump does.
They must destroy Putin before his ideas start to spread.
.
jldpc 22 hours agoFrom reading comments on ZH, Putin's ideas have already spread. His pro-capitalist, anti-globalist, fiscally-conservative, nationalist, and culturally conservative views are noticed. He has many admirers in the US.
REDinFL 17 hours ago remove linkIt has been 209 years (1812) since Napoleon's complete defeat in Russia.
It has been 99 years (1917-1922) since the end of the Russian Revolution discarding hundreds of years of Czarist rule, and the control/corruption of the elitist classes.
It has been 79 years (1942-1945) since the Germans were routed and destroyed by the Russians.
Think the Russians are going to cave-in to Joe B. and his band of wishful thinkers?
Threatening the well armed, and very experienced Russians is a fool's game.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. – Alexander Pope
PatriotSurge 17 hours ago remove linkAll of the angels are in heaven,
And few of the fools are dead.
-James Thurber, from "Further Fables for Our Time"
philbutler 11 hours agoI guarantee neither PedoJoe, nor any of his advisors have ever heard of the folly of attacking Russia. They don't read history.
Hell, most of them don't even read, clearly.
You are right. The only difference is, the Euromaidan put the Fourth Reich 250 miles from Moscow. It's a helluva head start over where Hitler finished. Nukes will be the endgame on this one I think.
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norecovery , Apr 17 2021 20:23 utc | 25
@ pnyx -- It's not only that USians are unaware of much of what's happening in other countries, it's the fact they are misinformed and misled about current events by propaganda. This is also the case in Europe because their MSM also have been co-opted by the coordinated Intelligence Apparatus (CIA - MI6 - FiveEyes) that controls the flow of information in the U.S. MSM. We are witnessing censorship/control of Social Media, Search Engines, and formerly independent websites as well.
This is an all-out effort of Class War. One aspect of this is to broadcast a hidden personal message that if I feel oppressed, "it must be my own fault" because "success" supposedly is within everyone's grasp (note the emphasis on celebrity 'culture').
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Apr 19, 2021 | www.youtube.com
Captain_ Shredder , 1 day agoThey investigated Trump with no evidence when Biden had evidence against him but would not be investigated
Abdul Jabars , 1 day ago"All I want to say is that they don't really care about us" - Michael Jackson
FactsNotFeelings , 1 day agoApologize will come flowing thru today..... You're out of your mind if you think any of them will apologize for this cause they knew what they were doing
Guru of Love , 1 day agoi got to say i love how when Kayley isn't talking, she has that very intense look on her face of listening and paying attention of what others are saying that is so dang cute. Got to love the most beast press secretary of all times! Im glad to see her on fox semi regularly now.
Alabama Mothman , 2 days agoShe can't get enough of fighting the gall because there is so much of it. It's vexing. Good for her.
Mark H , 22 hours agoThere is literally NO agency in our government that supports the American People.
Malone Mantooth , 1 day agoAnything they can say to deflect from their incompetence and lies, lies upon lies to deflect from the lies. Wow, it makes my head hurt.
Greg Marchegiani , 1 day agoWhen are "news" companies going to start being held accountable? They are the number one agitators of the U.S right now.
Kaley is articulated and concise, on point, because what she says is the product of her own intellect, not a script well studied (Psaki). That the core of the difference in my opinion.
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Apr 07, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Last night Bryan MacDonald, an Irish journalist currently working for RT, picked up on a theme we previously noted here .
Bryan MacDonald @27khv - 19:21 UTC · Apr 4, 2021With the US/UK press in full Russia hysteria mode, right now, it's time for a thread on things the Anglo-American media has accused Moscow of "weaponising."
We shall start with Charlie Sheen.
Yes. Really. Not a joke.
Take a bow, @ak_mack & @ForeignPolicy
biggerBryan MacDonald's thread is a good opportunity to update our list of all the issues, ideas and things Russia has weaponized.
Even while the list below now includes 111 entries - like robotic cockroaches, postmodernism and 14.legged squids - it is likely far from being complete.
- Was Noah Green the weaponized target of the GRU (Russian Military Intelligence) masked as the FBI Cointelpro?
Russia News, April 2021- Congress Can Do Better to Fight Weaponized Corruption
Foreign Policy, April 2021- WAR ON THE WEST West on brink of vaccine 'world war' as Putin 'weaponizes' Sputnik V jab to 'attack' the EU, warns Macron
Sun, March 2021- Secret Is Out: Russia Weaponized and Trained Dolphins and Whales
National Interest, January 2021- Russia 'is researching how to weaponise deadly Ebola virus as part of a catastrophic doomsday project', experts fear
Daily Mail, December 2020- Vladimir Putin wasted no time in weaponizing Trump's election conspiracies to spread Russian propaganda
Busines Insider, November 2020- How Russia Tried to Weaponize Charlie Sheen
Foreign Policy, September 2020- 'Beijing & Moscow have weaponized space through killer satellites, directed energy weapons': Defense Sec
Sociable, September 2020- Russia Weaponizes Increasingly Sophisticated Disinformation
AFCEA, September 2020- China and Russia 'have weaponised space with killer energy weapon satellites '
Daily Star, September 2020- Russia's Weaponization of Tradition : The Case of the Orthodox Church in Montenegro
CSIS, September 2020- Will Russia Weaponize Its Wheat As the World Combats the Coronavirus?
National Interest, July 2020- Russia Weaponized (Again) with Anthony Leonardi
OAN (video), July 2020- Putin's Russia has weaponized World War II
Atlantic Council, May 2020- Russia has weaponized ideas of Samuel Huntington
The Hill, February 2020- How Russia weaponized social media , got caught and escaped consequences
Washington Post, November 2019- How Russian Hybrid Warfare Has Weaponized Disinformation
Daily Signal, November 2019- Russian Hybrid Warfare Has Weaponized Disinformation
Ohio Star, November 2019- Russian Hybrid Warfare Has Weaponized Disinformation
Tennessee Star, November 2019- For Russia, Even the Language Can Be a Weapon
Bloomberg, November 2019- Russia Unveils 'Unique' Weaponized Icebreaker as It Eyes Arctic Oil and Gas
Newsweek, October 2019- The Weaponization of Postmodernism : Russia's New War with Europe
LSE, July 2019- The Russians weaponized laughter !
David Peck/Medium, February 2019- How Putin's Russia turned humour into a weapon
BBC, December 2018- Weaponizing an Economy : The Cryptoruble and Russia's Dystopian Future
U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), November 2018- Weaponizing Religion : Putin's Philosopher Ivan Ilyin
Daily Kos, November 2018- The Russians Are Weaponizing Health Information
History News Network, September 2018- Russian trolls are weaponizing the vaccine "debate" to divide Americans
Big Think, August 2018- US Accused Russia Of Weaponizing Space Due To "Abnormal Behavior" Of "Mysterious" Satellite
Raw Conservative Opinions, August 2018- It's been 5 months since a Putin critic was found murdered in London, but almost nothing's happened since -- and Russia is weaponizing the silence
Buisiness Insider, August 2018- Russia Accused Of 'Weaponized' Anti-Vaccine Disinformation Attacks
PrepForThat, August 2018- Weaponizing hypocrisy , in Russia and beyond
Columbia Journalism Review, July 2018- America's racism has long been Russia's secret weapon
CNN, July 2018- How Russia Is Weaponizing International Students in the New Cold War
Alternet, June 2018- Russia, Facebook & Cybersecurity: Combating Weaponized FUD in the Social Media Age
Information Week, June 2018- Polish PM Calls Nord Stream 2 'Weapon' Of Hybrid Warfare
RFERL, May 2018- Weaponizing culture : "civilizationism" and nationalism in Putin's Russia
NED, March 2018- Vladimir Putin Outwitted Megyn Kelly by Weaponizing Incompetence
The New Yorker, March 2018- Britain accuses Russia of 'weaponizing information ' with 2017 cyberattack
New York Post, February 2018- #PutinAtWar: How Russia Weaponized "Russophobia"
DRFLab/Medium, February 2018- Is Russia Weaponizing The Giant Squid ?
Alltime Conspiracies, January 2018- Putin weaponizes sheep , launches hybrid attacks on US bases in Romania
The Duran, January 2018- Russian army demonstrates latest weapon: Cuddly puppies
Associated Press, January 2018- The Weaponization of Tedium Is Putin's New Strategy (Op-ed)
Moscow Times, December 2017- Fake news and botnets: how Russia weaponised the web
Guardian, December 2017- How Russia Weaponized Social Media With 'Social Bots'
NPR, November 2017- Russia has weaponized the energy sector in war against the West
The Hill, October 2017- Russia's Facebook ads show how Internet microtargeting can be weaponized
Cornell University, October 2017- 'Russia weaponizing Facebook ' is a tipping point for how much we rely on tech, says author
CNBC, October 2017- How Russia Weaponized Primetime
Coda, October 2017- We're learning more about how Russia weaponized Facebook, Twitter, and Google -- and it was remarkably easy
Business Insider, October 2017- Putin threatens the world with weaponizing terrorism
Ukraine Military Pages, September 2017- Russia weaponized Twitter to sway election
CNN, September 2017- Russia Has Weaponized Energy
August 2017- Postmodernism Weaponized: Russia's Assault on American Science
American Council on Science and Health, August 2017- How Vladimir Putin weaponized the internet
The Week, June 2017- Weaponizing Kleptocracy : Putin's Hybrid Warfare
Hudson Institute, June 2017- Russia Has Weaponized Fake News to Sow Chaos
The New Republic, May 2017- Shaheen Says Russia 'Weaponizing' NatGas , Calls for More Sanctions
Natural Gas Intelligence, May 2017- How Russia Weaponized Social Media in Crimea
Strategy Bridge, May 2017- Eurovision, Russia, and weaponized disability
Euromaidan Press, March 2017- Russia Is 'Weaponizing Misinformation ,' Says UK Defense Secretary
NBC News, February 2017- 'Meet The Press' Roundtable: Russia Weaponizing Intelligence ; Replacing Obamacare
Real Clear Politics, January 2017- Schiff: Russia 'weaponized' computer hacking
Washington Examiner, January 2017- Rep. Schiff: Unlike China's Hacks, Russia 'Weaponized' Data
Newsmax, January 2017- Believe it or not: Western media uncovers Putin plan to 'weaponize' 14-legged squid
RT, December 2016- Russia Weaponized Social Media in U.S. Election, FireEye Says
Bloomberg, December 2016- Russia is Weaponizing culture in CEE by creating a traditionalist "counter-culture"
Stop Fake, December 2016- Is 14-legged killer squid found TWO MILES beneath Antarctica being weaponised by Putin?
Express, November 2016- Russia has weaponized the American press
Vice, October 2016- Putin 'Weaponizing' WikiLeaks to Help Trump: Clinton Campaign
Bloomberg, October 2016- A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories
New York Times, August 2016- Commentary: Hybrid Business -- The Risks In The Kremlin's Weaponization Of The Economy
RFERL, July 2016- Putin weaponizing Judo by distributing 7 million free copies of his book
SOTT, July 2016- Latvia Decides Putin Is Weaponizing Names - Bans Russian Names for New Babies
Russia Insider, June 2016- Putin is Weaponizing Popularity : Newsweek is not Amused
Off Guardian, June 2016- Putin Weaponises Crosshairs , Foiling Plans to Keep Romania & Poland Safe From Iranian WMDs
The Blog Mire, June 2016- Migrant crisis: Russia and Syria 'weaponising' migration
BBC, March 2016- UK Says Russia Weaponizing 'Brexit' - Russian Embassy Slams Charge
Russia Insider, March 2016- How Russia Is 'Weaponizing' Migration to Destabilize Europe
Bloomberg, March 2016- Is Putin Weaponising Stupidity ?
The Blogmire, March 2016- NATO commander: Russia 'weaponizing' Syrian immigrants
World Tribune, March 2016- Russia Is Weaponizing Dolphins - Europe Quakes In Terror
Russia Insider, March 2016- Russia accused of 'weaponizing' Syria refugees
CNBC, February 2016- Is Russia 'Weaponizing Refugees ' To Advance Its Geopolitical Goals?
RFERL, February 2016- Russian Hackers Used Weaponized Word Files to Infect Ukraine's Power Grid
Softpedia, Jan 2016- Russian Hackers May Have Weaponized The Grid , And It's Got US Intel Spooked
Daily Caller, January 2016- Russian "Weaponized Default " Will Cause Financial Collapse Of Entire Western World
Satu Insan, January 2016- Russia's Population Is Being Weaponized
RealClearWorld, December 2015- From commodification to weaponization: the Russian language as 'pride' and 'profit' in Russia's transnational discourses
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, December 2015- "Weaponizing" Federalism ? Russia and the Debate on Federalism/Decentralization in Ukraine and Other Post-Soviet States"
Ukrainian-Canadian Congress, December 2015- Weaponized AK47 NAILGUN - Russian Life Hack (vid)
Youtube, November 2015- Russia is Weaponizing Culture
Integrity Initiative, November 2015- Weaponized Default : Russia's Ultimate Answer to Western Aggression?
Russia Insider, September 2015- Russia May Soon Have Weaponized Robotic Cockroaches
Modern Notion, September 2015- Russia Has Weaponized Its National Trauma
ReadRussia, September 2015- Putin Has Weaponized Soviet History
Newsweek, July 2015- WEAPONIZATION OF FINANCE : Russia is turning to the Chinese yuan
Business Insider, June 2015- How Vladimir Putin Weaponized Russia's Media
Defense One , April 2015- Hearing: Confronting Russia's Weaponization of Information
Foreign Affairs, April 2015- How the Media Became One of Putin's Most Powerful Weapons
Atlantic, April 2015- Russia's "Weaponization" of Information
Heritage Foundation, April 2015- Weaponizing Weather : Russia And North Korea Might Be Able To Control The Weather, CIA Allegedly Fears
Inquisitr, Feb 2015- The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information , Culture and Money
The Interpreter, November 2014- Russia Has Weaponized Ebola
Fortuna's Cornor/Morgenpost, August 2014- Russia Is Weaponizing Jedi Mind Tricks
Vice News, April 2014- The Russians Have Weaponized Photoshop
Global Voices, March 2014- Whistleblower says Russians got antigravity weaponized spaceships
Lunatic Outpost, August 2012- Weaponizing the Russian language in Latvia again
Thoughts From Latvia, December 2011- WEAPONIZING NATIONALITY : AN ANALYSIS OF RUSSIA'S PASSPORT POLICY IN GEORGIA
International Law Journal, Summer 2010- More on Neo-Soviet Russia Weaponizing Psychiatry
Publius Pundit, August 2007Posted by b on April 5, 2021 at 10:53 UTC | Permalink
MarkU , Apr 5 2021 11:18 utc | 1
Some people, crazed extremists no doubt, might regard all that as a way of softening up public opinion for conflict. Reading through the list, it seems more like the ravings of paranoid schizophrenics then it does journalists.peter mcloughlin , Apr 5 2021 11:19 utc | 2This demonizing of Russia is an attempt to portray it as a threat: there is certainly a clash of interests between Russia and the West. But the confrontation being pursued will not lead to the conclusion NATO predicts. Failure to heed the warnings of history is leading us to the nuclear apocalypse.Josh , Apr 5 2021 11:44 utc | 3
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/Have to vote for #106. No contest, that's the winner.Tuyzentfloot , Apr 5 2021 11:52 utc | 4How US media weaponizes 'weaponizing'.Mao Cheng Ji , Apr 5 2021 12:00 utc | 5Yeah, little goebbelses of the western liberal establishment aren't too creative.j. casey , Apr 5 2021 12:03 utc | 6Brilliant, Mr. B. And funny, too. Gracias.Carl , Apr 5 2021 12:11 utc | 7Pathetic as this kind of propaganda is...it works. Which is very disturbing.librul , Apr 5 2021 12:22 utc | 8Hmm...think this is not off topic.Stonebird , Apr 5 2021 12:26 utc | 9Even for Reuters their center headline, photo and subtext are over the top.
They no longer make any effort to disguise political opinion as facts
(their sheeple readers won't catch on).As of this writing the headline is:
Half of Republicans believe false accounts of Capitol riot: Reuters/Ipsos poll
and the subtext is:
Since the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have pushed false and misleading accounts to downplay the event that left five dead and scores of others wounded. His supporters appear to have listened.from number 69James Cook , Apr 5 2021 13:02 utc | 11He tread water wearing a blissful smile as the organism approached him (14 armed killer squid). Obviously the "vampire Squid" Goldman Sachs has been submersively trying to disrupt Russia.
Is there anything that humans have created that has NOT BEEN WEAPONIZED??????????Stonebird , Apr 5 2021 13:02 utc | 12Irresistable force https://twitter.com/27khv/status/1378798225927380992/photo/1William Gruff , Apr 5 2021 13:12 utc | 13(From b's first link above)
Why would the CIA be so interested in the ability of North Korea to modify weather? Most probably because the CIA's efforts to pull off a repeat of the flooding in North Korea in 1994-1995 failed and they want to know why.Virgile , Apr 5 2021 13:14 utc | 14Aside: Research the CIA's "Operation Popeye" in 1967 Vietnam if you are doubtful of how evil and crazy the CIA is.
Most likely the party involved in foiling the CIA's plot to flood North Korea again and trigger another famine was China and not Russia. Not only does China have extensive experience with cloud seeding, but they are in the proper location to accomplish the task. Cloud seeding is how the Chinese provided clear weather over Beijing for the Olympics in 2008... they seeded air masses farther upwind to make it rain there and dry out the air heading to Beijing. If the air heading towards North Korea (relatively consistent west to east flow there) has already been seeded and much of the moisture in it already precipitated out, then when the CIA's spook planes seed it nearer to the Korean peninsula it will be too dry to squeeze much more rain out of. The CIA would be cockblocked and frustrated and they will naturally want to know why their attempts at genocide failed.
The Western media parrots in action!librul , Apr 5 2021 14:19 utc | 15
https://collateralglobal.org/Erelis , Apr 5 2021 14:37 utc | 16Our Mission
At Collateral Global, we believe that there is an urgent need to study the consequences of public health measures implemented in response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, including the second and third-order effects.
Through commitment to the enduring principles of scientific inquiry, we aim to provide scholarship and research, building an evidence-based understanding of mitigation measures that is both accessible and actionable.How long until the above site is compromised or McCarthyism-smeared?
Maybe these count. I looked for variations of weaponize in title. These were stories I remember reading and did quick search to retrieve something about them. Great list.ak74 , Apr 5 2021 14:41 utc | 17Russians Reportedly Weaponized Black Activism in U.S. During Presidential Election
https://www.diversityinc.com/russians-reportedly-weaponized-black-activism-u-s-presidential-election/Don't Let Russia Undermine Trust in Science
Disinformation around genetic editing could set back advances to improve both health and the economy.
https://slate.com/technology/2018/12/russia-science-disinformation-genetic-editing-crispr-social-media.htmlIowa Researchers Accuse Russia of Injecting Anti-GMO Propaganda Into U.S. Media
https://gizmodo.com/iowa-researchers-accuse-russia-of-injecting-anti-gmo-pr-1823364808Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6137759/I am deeply troubled that you conveniently neglected to include another fearsome Russian Super-Dooper Weapon: the children's cartoon Masha and the Bear .MikeH , Apr 5 2021 14:41 utc | 18Future shock: Ban threat for the new Russian superweapon Masha and shows that subverted all our minds
https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/16340356.future-shock-ban-threat-new-russian-superweapon-masha-shows-subverted-minds/Children's show is propaganda for Putin, say critics
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/childrens-show-is-propaganda-for-putin-say-critics-j9wxcvslm?region=global&--xx-meta=denied_for_visit%3D0%26visit_number%3D0%26visit_remaining%3D0%26visit_used%3D0&--xx-mvt-opted-out=false&--xx-uuid=bbcdd521f8671d6ea5e55d42f09bbec8&ni-statuscode=acsaz-307It's obvious that Masha and the Bear is a nefarious Russian plot to steal the precious bodily fluids of our children!
We must be constantly vigilant. The CIA, FBI, MI6, NSA, and Homeland Security must be notified about the Masha Threat. YouTube must censor Masha. And blue check-marked Twitter police must condemn anyone who watches Masha.
I can't believe Russia weaponizing Chuck Norris hasn't been claimed, yet.librul , Apr 5 2021 14:49 utc | 19This one didn't have the word 'weaponize', close though: "opening a new front in its spy battles".librul , Apr 5 2021 15:00 utc | 20accusing the Kremlin of opening a new front in its spy battles with the West amid the worldwide competition to contain the pandemic.
...American intelligence officials said the Russians were aiming to steal research to develop their own vaccine more quickly, not to sabotage other countries' efforts. There was likely little immediate damage to global public health, cybersecurity experts said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/us/politics/vaccine-hacking-russia.html
From The Atlantic:polecat , Apr 5 2021 15:07 utc | 21
"How Putin Got Into America's Mind"
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/how-putin-got-into-americas-mind/616330/
Russia's weaponized ZersetzungFound another (though not very mainstream):
...
And although economic sanctions might hurt Russia's economy, they won't easily heal the divisions that weaponized decomposition has deepened in America. Putin's assault on the national soul is working.
https://airmail.news/issues/2021-2-27/the-view-from-here
"Putin's allies weaponize wokeness to cancel the leader of the opposition, Alexei Navalny"So, the word for the weary is ***Weaponize*** .. with an R.Fíréan , Apr 5 2021 15:08 utc | 22'sigh'
Next they're weaponizing women's exotic underwear . God help the freemason who turns up at the changing rooms in the wrong attire.gottlieb , Apr 5 2021 15:15 utc | 23
/humor.humour.Brilliant compilation to illustrate the propaganda war against Russia. The China list won't be far behind as Enemy #1 for Empire is competition.jared , Apr 5 2021 15:26 utc | 24The simple fact is that WWIII is underway. We can see the slow motion train wreck as it careens off the tracks into the nuclear weapons depot.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.
The U.S. media is weaponizing ignorance.Tuyzentfloot , Apr 5 2021 15:36 utc | 25
The more one absorbs their reporting, the more the brain is reduced to mush.
I can only manage a few hundred works and I become irritated and disoriented.
My hat is off to people who can somehow look at that stuff and remain sane.
Or are they...hmmm...A major mistake in interpreting the massive parallelism of all these claims is to assume a form of central coordination.james , Apr 5 2021 16:17 utc | 26
In fact the parallellism is spontaneous once the target has a bad reputation. Centrally organized propaganda can tune the reputation of the target but even that is not essential and it can happen organically. Once the reputation is set however the process has its own momentum. There is a bit more to it than merely the reputation of the target because the positive reputation of those who attack the target also plays. In fact you have to work with a large network of trust relations to get a good picture.
Glenn Greenwald recently linked to an article of Erik Weinstein on Russell Conjugation , how the same events get an entirely different emotional content depending on the reporter. In the long list of links above everyone is using the same spectacles for looking at events, but also for filtering what is relevant , meaningful and worthy of attention.
This is why the NYTimes is still an interesting paper once you know how to read it. But few people can use it that way.i'm with ak74... let me know when they weaponize Masha and the Bear.... then we are really in trouble! they have already weaponized karlof1 !!!Jackrabbit , Apr 5 2021 16:55 utc | 28Russia weaponizing vaccine resistance: Russian trolls blamed for spreading anti-vaccination propagandajayc , Apr 5 2021 16:58 utc | 29Because vaccine resistance in USA somehow makes Russia safer ... or something. Doubts about mRNA vaccines? You must be a Putin bot.
!!
The Russians, along with the Chinese, have apparently weaponized the protests of British citizens against overreaching Police legislation.div> Surely Harry and Megan must have been weaponized by that dreadful Putin! Stands to reason. Doesn't it?"The disruption being caused through "Kill the Bill" protests in UK is an effort by the Sino-Russian alliance to destroy trust and confidence in political and institutional systems, in a bid to leave society demoralised and feeling powerless against events."
https://www.sundayguardianlive.com/news/china-russia-use-social-media-fuel-protests-ukPosted by: foolisholdman , Apr 5 2021 17:25 utc | 31
Surely Harry and Megan must have been weaponized by that dreadful Putin! Stands to reason. Doesn't it?lysias , Apr 5 2021 18:58 utc | 35Posted by: foolisholdman | Apr 5 2021 17:25 utc | 31
As the Heydrich character says in the Wannsee Conference movie, "Das ist die Sprachregelung".Ana Q , Apr 5 2021 19:19 utc | 37Looking for something in wikipedia, I discover that in 1961, the first manned spaceflight was..."a propaganda victory". There's no hope!Trauma2000 , Apr 5 2021 19:56 utc | 38We need to keep in mind one thing: That which The West accuses Russia of, they are actually committing themselves.Bernard F. , Apr 5 2021 19:56 utc | 39Nearly all of the 'weaponisations' that we are reading about above, The West is actually DOING. The hypocracy is incredible. But we need to look at this hypocrisy, because in all instances the propaganda is being directed at YOU! You / Us / Me in The West. We are the target of this propaganda. In many instances it is MILITARY ORGANISTIONS that are targeting civilians with lies and misinformation. WE are being attacked by military organisations.
I think enough is enough on The West. It's disgraceful that military organisations are allowed to target civilians with BLATANT propaganda. It's time to fight back.
Thank you for sharing.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/gayle-tzemach-lemmon-americas-partner-isis-fight-seeking-clarityBernard F. , Apr 5 2021 20:23 utc | 40
Amerika weaponized YPG & ISIS
RussiaMichael , Apr 5 2021 21:54 utc | 44RussiaFrance weaponized Covid-19 vaccine"We are facing a new type of world war , dealing with the actions of Russia and China trying to gain influence through the supply of vaccines,""Allez vous cacher, vilaines"Emmanuel Macron 26.03.2021
Les Précieuses ridicules, MolièreGotta love it! Conclusive proof of the Imperial "Free and Independent" press. ;-)theyreeverywhere , Apr 5 2021 21:55 utc | 45Howdy people. I think Russians have weaponized word 'weaponized' because presence in headlines represents most useful mechanism to map current extent of Mockingbird 2 operations.michaelj72 , Apr 5 2021 23:02 utc | 46classical psychological projection by the weaponized narrative enablers of the worst Empire in all human history, as we stand at 90 Seconds to Midnight on the very precipice of nuclear war and ecological catastrophe, and the engine of the Armageddon Express starts to go off the cliff....blues , Apr 5 2021 23:18 utc | 47
but LOOK, over there!!
....it's all russia's and putin's fault
I have two parakeets that I have been trying to weaponize for the better part of a month. But it appears to be totally hopeless. If Mr. Putin happens to read this blog for some weaponistic purpose, would you please offer me some of your invaluable advice? Please?uncle tungsten , Apr 5 2021 23:21 utc | 48Norwegian #33Miss Lacy , Apr 6 2021 0:05 utc | 49That contact tracing applies in Australia now. Commerce as usual and the coffee is fine.
It only applies when there is a continuous daily detection - even one triggers the rule. All is good, no Galicia brigade at the door. Yet.
I think weaponized sheep is the winner, with incompetence a close second.vetinLA , Apr 6 2021 0:18 utc | 50
Jen, can you please tell me where one can watch the skating? Or perhaps, well we would call them re-runs in the ancient history days - perhaps utoobs?
I see tantalizing hints on RT, but no real films.
The russian skaters (from what I saw last year) are truly amazing. Thanks.Edward Bernays would be amazed..Jen , Apr 6 2021 0:35 utc | 51Norwegian @ 33:Kiza , Apr 6 2021 1:18 utc | 52If the system used by restaurants and cafes in HK is similar to what we have in Australia, then they are required at least to provide a method by which their customers can be contacted and advised if someone who has tested positive for COVID-19 has also visited the eateries within 14 days of the customers having visited the establishments. That way those customers can know if they need to isolate and limit their contacts with others.
The contact tracing is also supposed to help government authorities know how quickly the disease is or is not spreading so they only have to lockdown certain neighbourhoods or areas where there may be a cluster developing, instead of locking down an entire city or a state or even a whole country.
Also you need to be careful reading Al Jazeera articles: Al Jazeera is definitely not a fan of Russia or China.
"... And among those chafing at the government's response, like restaurant owners and their customers, a form of grassroots resistance was forged.Instead of asking their customers to scan the health department's QR code and transmit their location, some owners have designed an alternative code that feeds into a Googleform which will be erased every 31 days, the period for which businesses are required by authorities to retain the data ..."
That action by the restaurant owners is not exactly grassroots resistance if the authorities have already approved the Googleform and the erasures.
The one thing the Al Jazeera article missed (deliberately perhaps?) is that COVID-19 restrictions have been relaxing in Hong Kong since February 2021 at least.
Around ten years ago, I called this "Dog Putin ate my homework syndrome". It is not only propaganda against an economic, political and even soul competitor (last resort of real Christianity is Russia), it is not even just a projection ("killer Putin", as Putin himself explained). Its primary purpose is to tell you why you are living worse than 20 years ago, why your children will live even worse than you now if they remain in this lost cause of deeply corrupt and rotten so called countries. It is an excuse for everything that is wrong - it is all because Putin and Xi weaponised it.CarlD , Apr 6 2021 1:33 utc | 53When I see such things in alt media, since I do not consume the swill from the main sewerage media, I get that sinking feeling that I live in a wrong place, a place without a future.
I do not care who the "authorities" denigrate, Russia, China, they are even to me. I only wish they would do something to reduce the problems of our own societies instead of always blaming someone else. Because as long as the rulers and their sewerage media sycophants keep pointing fingers at Russia and China nothing will change for the better here where I am.
Jen @ 50uncle tungsten , Apr 6 2021 1:34 utc | 54You mention a Googleform? in HK?
Google is not accesible in China. Baidu only.
My hearing aids play the Red Flag when they turn on.jiri , Apr 6 2021 2:26 utc | 55
My Win10 pc plays the Internationale just show Gates that the Ruskies have his code.My iPhone needs the hammer and sickle swipe on the dot matrix encryption pad.
Those Ruskies have a wicked sense of humor.
Very revealing list.chola3 , Apr 6 2021 3:15 utc | 56Provides a fairly comprehensive list of what the West itself has been trying to do to Russia.
Case of projection.
Any propaganda works if the people know they will never suffer the consequences of war.Jen , Apr 6 2021 3:28 utc | 57The idea, all the way from Saddam Hussein, that we can influence the USA public to stop their govt waging war on us, is misplaced.
I used to believe it too. I dont believe anymore. I dont believe the USA govt needs to strain themselves to get the citizens behind them to put up blockades/sanctions or launch cruise missiles.
Some still think this or that event will be used to "sanction russia", "attack iran" etc.
(The "more sanctions coming" part is weird. As though Russia today prospers at the pleasure of the West)
The only thing that stops an attack on Iran is hard cold realities of thousands of dead US Marines and destitution at home once the oil terminals are blown up. Same vs Russia.
Still bloggers write stuff to try to convince the Anerican public.
Only thing that convinces any person/society is the consequences for actions.
But mark my words: West was beaten on 2020-01-08. Payment soon to Russia for going along with the c19. Iran got some of its payment with that 25yr agreement.
Carl D @ 52:vetinLA , Apr 6 2021 3:39 utc | 58It's still "One Country / Two Systems" in China / Hongkong as far as I can tell. If Googleforms are not available in Hongkong, maybe you need to tell The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
"Because as long as the rulers and their sewerage media sycophants keep pointing fingers at Russia and China nothing will change for the better here where I am."psychohistorian , Apr 6 2021 4:30 utc | 59Posted by: Kiza | Apr 6 2021 1:18 utc | 51
Absolutely Kiza, damn shame, but expect no change, and no disappointment will arise. The new feudalism has arrived.
Below is a link to the latest Alastair Crooke piece at Strategic Culture and the take away quoteKassandra , Apr 6 2021 6:58 utc | 60The take away ending quote
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For the EU, the Chinese entry into global politics is more problematic. It was trying to leverage its own 'strategic autonomy' by erecting European values as the gateway to inclusion into its market and trade partnership. China effectively is telling the world to reject any such hegemonic imposition of alien values and rights.The EU is stranded in the midst. Unlike the U.S., it is precluded from printing the money with which to resurrect its virus-blighted economy. It desperately needs trade and investment. Its biggest trading partner, and its tech well-spring, however, has just told the EU (as the U.S.), to give up on its moralising discourse. At the same time, Europe's 'security partner' has just demanded the opposite – that the EU strengthens it. What's to be done? Sit back, and watch (with fingers crossed that no one does something extremely stupid).
"Trying to wade through the muck that passes as news today IS a fools errand.Tuyzentfloot , Apr 6 2021 7:57 utc | 61
Long time reader of MOA, followed Paveway long ago.
B, keep this site alive and let me know how to contribute.It was an interesting demonstration of the circularity of belief mechanisms at work when people adopted ideas like: "Putin did not really intervene in our elections, he was much more devious. He made us think he did intervene and that way caused us to undermine ourselves! That is how devilish he is and we were even more right than we thought about that!"Norwegian , Apr 6 2021 8:36 utc | 63I recently read an article which stuck with me on a Flemish 'eminence grise' (Jan Balliauw)on Russia which commented on the European turnabout over the Sputnik vaccine(in dutch) : yes we misjudged the Russian vaccine but it is the fault of the Russians and the bastards are cheering now! And he goes on to the main theme by emphasizing the Russians can't be trusted.
@Jen | Apr 6 2021 0:35 utc | 50Bernard F. , Apr 6 2021 9:13 utc | 64It is beyond question that such a "system" is overly hysterical, to say the least . Show me the proof that there is a need to cancel democracy and human rights for something that does not affect 99.9% if anyone at all. And if you do, why not lock everybody in because of traffic accidents, violent crime or actual diseases such as malaria, dengue fever or whatever.
I question the motives for what is going on: that is to say: I do not accept that people's health is the driving factor behind this. Show me the proof that what is claimed is actually happening and if so also show me the proof that the intrusive technology is actually meaningful. In my view this is conditioning the people to accept personal surveillance on a level that goes far beyond 1984, and it is infinitely more scary than "covid".
HowBernard F. , Apr 6 2021 9:18 utc | 65RussiaAmerika+France+UK+++ weaponized "the Great Syrian Democratic Revolution"How much longer can people still insist that there is a Syrian revolution, when the most powerful group is not only friendly to the West, but an "asset"?Very well summarize
https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2021/04/06/648860/US-Media-Al-Qaeda-Facelift
@ Mina | Apr 6 2021 8:11 utc | 61Jen , Apr 6 2021 12:10 utc | 66Since
19471830, "We" subsidize colonisationNorwegian @ 62:Jackrabbit , Apr 6 2021 14:36 utc | 68In Australia, the minimum that restaurants, cafes, other dining establishments, other private retail establishments and places where large numbers of people might gather can do is provide a way in which customers and patrons can be notified that they may have come in contact with someone who has COVID-19 or who has tested positive for COVID-19. But most of these places cannot compel people to leave their contact details (usually mobile phone numbers) with them.
In cases where places do compel people to leave their mobile phone details for the purposes of contact tracing, people have the option of going somewhere else that does not insist on their leaving their contact details behind.
The system used in Hong Kong dining places appears to be similar to the system used in Australia: by law, these establishments must provide methods by which people can be contacted if they become sites of infection. They either encourage people to download a contact-tracing app or ask people to write their details down on paper forms. Customers have the option also of not going out at all and eating at home, which is difficult to do in a culture where dining out in public with friends and family is expected and where most people live in small apartments so they prefer to entertain others by taking them out to restaurants and cafes.
Some restaurants and cafes in HK have also refused to take people's contact details and have opted to serve takeaway meals only.
Theoretically this system would reduce the need for blanket lockdowns of an entire city or a larger administrative unit such as a state or province, or even country. In Sydney, the NSW government used contact tracing to determine that a cluster of COVID-19 cases was limited mainly to the northeast side of the metropolitan area and this part of Sydney was subjected to lockdown. Traffic access to the area (population: about 250,000) was blocked by police. The lockdown lasted about 21 days and included New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. During this period people living in the affected area couldn't leave it but were allowed to leave their homes for exercise, essential shopping and getting takeaway meals within the area.
The issue that Al Jazeera brings up is an issue of compulsion and creeping authoritarian rule (based on stereotypes about China and the Chinese government) but it uses a poor example to demonstrate what it wants its readers to believe. It turns out that the HK govt is not forcing all dining establishments to use its contact-tracing app but is giving them a choice. Al Jazeera should have done better research.
Norwegian @Apr6 8:36 #62:Jackrabbit , Apr 6 2021 15:28 utc | 69Show me the proof that there is a need to cancel democracy and human rights for something that does not affect 99.9% ...Jen is not advocating for canceling democracy and human rights. And the pandemic affects us all. Everyone is capable of getting sick and passing it on to others.Democracies have responded to the pandemic with measures that many people find onerous and many lies have been spread by some of these people such as: 1)"masks don't work" (they do work but they protect others, not the mask-wearer) ; 2) "only old people die" (even teens have died); and 3) that the pandemic is a hoax (it's not just the flu!).
Your "... does not affect 99.9% if anyone at all" is just regurgitating nonsense.
Many more-authoritarian countries have actually been more successful in fighting the pandemic. They haven't had to have the long "lockdowns" (a misnomer that exaggerates) that Western democracies have imposed. Among the things that they have done (as temporary emergency measures) is: rigorous contact-tracing, and quarantining the sick and suspected sick.
I would also note that the hypocrisy is astounding:
!!
- People that DEMAND a return to normalcy also argue against the actions that could have returned us to normal much sooner than waiting for experimental vaccines;
- Libertarians that don't complain much about laws like speed limits and the prohibition against yelling "fire!" in a crowed theater are DEMANDING an end to pandemic measures that curtail their liberty;
- Republicans that are pushing for voting ID and accept a police state are DEMANDING that the economy be "opened up".
follow-up @Apr 6 2021 14:36 utc | 67ak74 , Apr 6 2021 16:49 utc | 70I should add, for the benefit of readers that don't know me, that my criticism of those who are critical of pandemic measures doesn't mean that I'm not skeptical of many things about this pandemic such as:
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- USA/Empire desire to stoke hate for China;
- Big Pharma - government ties;
- mRNA tech which has been funded by US Mil for use in biowarfare;
- the immense propaganda spawned by the the above and the sheeple's acceptance of same.
The only thing that holds America or the "democratic" West together is an increasingly rabid hatred of Russia and China.The Western-controlled Free Press and its unhinged accusations against Russia is matched by its equally unhinged torrent of Yellow Peril propaganda against China, as evidenced below:
Why the racism against Asians?, ask fundamentalist sinophobics...
https://nomadicthoughts.blogs.sapo.pt/why-the-racism-against-asians-ask-93263Simply put, the collective West--led by the America and the Anglosphere--resembles a civilization of paranoid schizophrenics, whose delusional ravings will drive them towards world war--total war.
Needless to say, things will not end well for them.
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